Monday, January 15, 2007
In hardly the space of 1 day, the number of baby Triops has exploded from 2 to 13!! Right now there are 3 biggish ones, the rest are newly-hatched. Not sure if the larger 3 will end up cannibalising them though. A few of these 13 came from residual eggs in the original tank, but the vast majority were unplanned babies - story below.
I first separated relatively-pure eggs a week or 2 ago, from the main tank. These were siphoned from the sand in the tank, placed in a petri dish and swirled. The lighter eggs separated from the sand and were deposited in the centre from centripedal forces, and were again siphoned out and the process repeated until I managed to get pure eggs with a few grains of sand. These were placed in a CSF culture bottle (=p) with some of the old tank water. I intended to let these eggs dry out slowly (as opposed to my previous batches of eggs, which I dried out in the space of 2 days), but I left the cap on!
No hatchings were observed in the last week, probably due to the anoxic conditions in the tube. However, I remembered leaving the cap on and wanted to let the water evaporate, so I removed the cap a couple of days ago. I suppose the sudden oxygenation of the water triggered the mass hatching. =
Oh well .. so many eggs, might as well use up some! Still have a small bottle of ~100 pure eggs and 3 zip-loc bags of egg-sand mix - anyone else want these? Gonna pass hypoC's to him soon, heehee!
Spent a hell lot of time today editing my UROP report ... OMG, I have only 3 references for my entire paper!!!!!!!! ARGHH!!!! EW, have you finished with yours yet? This is seriously THE LAST THING anyone would want to do right now, and I'm trying to get it totally out of the way asap.
To end the post, here are some shots I took over the weekend. The constellation Orion was in such splendour, and this constellation has such particular meaning for me =)
First shot is that of Orion itself, you can clearly see the characteristic square that the 4 brightest stars form, and the famous Orion's Belt made up of 3 straight-linking stars in the middle. Just below the Belt (to the right, in the photo) are the other 2 stars (actually, one of them is really a nebula) that make up Orion's sword in this constellation.
Next, as per my custom, an enhanced image of the same constellation but with a 25-second exposure and post-production processing. OMG, I never knew there were so many other stars around this constellation - try and see if you can make out the original Orion amongst all the stars!
And finally, a more perspective shot showing Orion to the upper left corner, and a really bright object in the middle (just to the right of the spike of light from streetlamps). It's easily the brightest star at night right now, and I'm very much inclined to think that this is, in fact, the planet Venus. I didn't look up the star charts on that night though, so don't take my word for it.
*Update* I just checked it up, that bright star is in fact Sirius, one of the brightest stars in the night sky, part of the constellation Canis Major. Interestingly, it can be identified by tracing through the straight line formed by Orion's belt!
Wenky
1:14 AM
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