{"id":993,"date":"2010-05-22T00:12:07","date_gmt":"2010-05-22T06:12:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bogott.net\/unspecified\/2010\/05\/22\/flea-circus\/"},"modified":"2010-05-22T00:12:07","modified_gmt":"2010-05-22T06:12:07","slug":"flea-circus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bogott.net\/unspecified\/?p=993","title":{"rendered":"Flea circus"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Lately I’ve been having some unintended success with producing large amounts of freshwater microalgae (it’s growing in the water bath which keeps my on-purpose plankton tanks warm) so I decided it was time to get some filter-feeding freshwater plankton to turn my green water into something useful.<\/p>\n

Ever since I got these guys (the grown-ups are about 1\/4″ or a bit less) I’ve been claiming to everyone that they’re ‘born pregnant.’ I’m still pretty sure that’s right, but wikipedia<\/a> doesn’t back me up so I’d like to get some photographic evidence. The above shots are with my pocket camera — the following are with a kid’s digital microscope.<\/p>\n

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Puzzling! Not only are there not tiny pregnant daphnia inside the parent, but there aren’t even baby fleas in there at all — just blobs that look suspiciously like eggs. Either I’m completely misunderstanding how this life-cycle is supposed to work, or my daphnia have decided that my basement is about to suffer ice and\/or drought and they’re making little bomb shelters to weather the coming cataclysm.<\/p>\n

I will try to scoop out a few more expectant mothers tomorrow and see if everyone is in the egg business or if I just happened to scoop out the one long-term thinker.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, here are a few close-ups of one of the ostracods that have started reproducing like mad in an underpopulated shrimp tank. Another let-down: turns out that when multiplied 60x they just look like big pinto beans rather than tiny ones.<\/p>\n\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lately I’ve been having some unintended success with producing large amounts of freshwater microalgae (it’s growing in the water bath which keeps my on-purpose plankton tanks warm) so I decided it was time to get some filter-feeding freshwater plankton to … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-993","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-critters"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bogott.net\/unspecified\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/993","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bogott.net\/unspecified\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bogott.net\/unspecified\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bogott.net\/unspecified\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bogott.net\/unspecified\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=993"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bogott.net\/unspecified\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/993\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bogott.net\/unspecified\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=993"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bogott.net\/unspecified\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=993"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bogott.net\/unspecified\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=993"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}