New Fittings Make the Water Go Round

You can never see the end from the beginning.

     The flu thought it had me, but I triumphed. With only the time to stop in this week and momentarily reacquaint with the new parts for the bell siphon, I'm optimistic. Matt picked up a few much smaller sized fittings than what I was using before, but I think that it will make all the difference. Hopefully Friday I'll have enough time and either Josh or Matt will have enough leisure to really get past this phase with the setup so I can finally get some fish pooing and some bacteria colonizing and some plants growing. Next step is general construction on the two level system so if you hear construction-y sounds over the next week, fret not, there's men at work.

Bell Siphon Woes

It's exactly what it looks like.

     I've taken preliminary steps toward getting this bell siphon working, but it feel like one step forward, two steps back. Getting a continuous flow of water running through the siphon is what creates the suction pressure that relieves the upper tank into the lower as the pressure difference equalizes. I know now that for the tank size setup I'm using, half-inch PVC is waaay too big and would almost never allow for a continuous stream of water to form, owing to the amount of water available. Josh helped me run more than a few test runs with varying sized siphons and only twice did the bell siphon work as planned. Lesson learned, anyway.
 

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?

A Healthy Dose of What

I hate to have to admit it, but I feel...directionless. Not entirely or assuredly, but mostly. I really appreciate everyone's help this last week in learning the paces and finding a direction, and I know I'll figure a project soon, but the wide world of research is wide. I especially want to thank Danielle, who can click with the best of them, and who, if there were a Clicky Olympics, would be going because of her clicking ability. Redundant, but necessarily so. I'm eager to find out tomorrow if my cricket catching traps were aptly named, or whether I should have just called them trash...err...trial one.

Situational realization sets in: it's a trap!

 

    Photo credit of cricket-pooing bottle to: http://www.wikihow.com/Image:Catch-Crickets-Step-10.jpg