The Daphnia Project

This has to be one of the highlight experiments of the year! Looking into a RM3000 microscope and counting the number of heart beats per minute of the Daphnia. Now that is what I call science :D

First we had to take these Daphnias, that is water fleas from this huge beaker filled with brown stuff and a plant. I could see from the side of the beaker that they were jumping up and down in the water, mmmm. We used a dropper to take a couple of them and placed it on a glass slide. Then we used some cotton to keep them in place so that they wont move around :P

Then under the microscope they went! After that we had to put drops of caffeine on the water flee, and by then their hearts started beating like 200 somethin beats per minute! Those of you who have never gotten a chance to see a flee up close this is how it looks like:


Well this flea has eggs in her body so that's not exactly what i saw under the microscope. Mine was egg free :D