The Possibilities

    

Thane's aquaponic setup, with subterranean fish tank.

     A productive day, I met with one Thane McWhorter of endlessfoodsystems.com to talk about aquaponics, and really, food growing in general. Shane invited me to his house to see his home aquaponic system setup and walked me through the process of setting up a much smaller system for a project at Phoenix College. I should interject that an aquaponic system is a setup that uses the nitrogen cycle to maintain an equilibrium between fish and plants. The system that I’m trying to set-up, which is an example of a very basic system, contains two tanks, one for fish and one for plants. Water is cycled between the two systems carrying from fish to plants, nitrates (food), which the plants uptake and which in the process re-oxygenates and purifies the water which is cycled back to the fish. Problems in the system generally occur as a result of too much fish waste, not enough fish waste, or an imbalance of the pH levels in the water. I’ve interjected too much now, and so the tale of Thane McWhorter and his Garden of Eden will have to wait until next week.

Photo credit to: http://www.endlessfoodsystems.com/customer-gallery.html

Unknown Testing

After ‘successfully’ identifying my unknown as a spore I ran the MSA and glucose fermentation tests, and at Josh's behest ran a motility test as well. Results (drum roll):

MSA, negative

Glucose Fermentation, negative

Gas Production, positive

Motility…negative

Looks like three out of four tests agree, and with that we have ourselves a winner: Bacillus Cereus…or, so it should have been had my initial test been correctly verified as gram positive instead of, as I had presumed, gram negative. Pseudomonas Aeruginosa is the correct perpetrator after all, and funny enough, all of the tests and results would have had the same finality aside from that first hiccup. So after a long and insightful initial foray into the world of biology, and more specifically unknown testing, I can in the least say biology is fun and communal, two thumbs up. Now it’s time to move headlong into the greater part of this semester’s project: aquaponics, or as Josh hopes, a salsa factory for his impending war on the burritos. On a side note, riddle me this: what is the difference between motility and mobility?