I didn’t get a chance to go in to lab this weekend so I couldn’t get my notes, so I’m doing it now. I posted all my results from looking under the scope on Friday evening here. Side note: I looked at the sample again today and everything was still busting with life. No tardigrades, but I got some cool videos which I’m posting to BenchFly (I’ll post in my notebook when they’re up).

Onto the notes…

Out of all the samples one had some mold on it so I threw it out. It was the sample with the mystery fungus. Ok now let’s move onto my method:

• When we first gathered the samples, I added water to the dry samples. The lichen sample got about 10mL of DI water and was allowed to soak for a few days.
• I filled 3 analyslides (see Experiments’ product list link above), each with 6mL of DI water.
• I would use a pair of tweezers to grab a chunk of lichen from the original sample and place it in an analyslide. With the tweezers I would shake the lichen sample for about 1 minute. This would break the lichen into much smaller chunks which should release the water bears from their shelter/slumber.

• In the lab we have an Olympus IX71 inverted microscope and I used a 20x objective to visualize the samples.
• I ended up checking 2 of the 3 samples I prepared, and saw nothing but lichen chunks in there. Eventually I looked at the original petri dish sample and got all the cool results that I mentioned earlier.