8/23/2023

This is my first year in W.I.S.R.D. and I think I should list the things I want to do over the year. I want to start a bug collection for studying, I would also like to help work on the autonomous tanks, I would like to examine some mushrooms and find out how they help sustain other plants around them in their symbiotic relationship(Maybe grow some plants with mushrooms and some without) I also want to study some more marine biology and study more birds and go bird watching while keeping count of the different types of birds I see.

8/24/2023

Today I decided that I wanted to work with mushrooms. I want to get 3 or 4 potato plants and different types of mushrooms for each and see what happens if they all are in the same environment and water in the same amount. I will still bird-watch and work on my bug collection.

8/29/2023

Today I dissected 3 owl pellets. I found lots of mice bones and a massive skull I have not identified the skull yet but I let them soak in water to get all of the hair out. I will post an update when I have identified them.

8/31/2023

Today I cleaned off the bones and found owl pellets. I am leaving them overnight to soak before we organize them. I started a new project with Brian that tested how light and humidity affect mushrooms. The things we are testing are one mushroom that will be in more direct sunlight another that is in less direct sunlight one is in a completely dark box with no light and the other one is in a mushroom growing humidity chamber that is optimal for growth. They are all getting the same amount of water, I am doing these tests to get good at growing mushrooms which leads to the next part of this project which is going to be growing microgreens and parrying them with different types of mushrooms to see how it affects the plant’s growth. I will go into more detail about what this other project entails when it is time to grow everything.

8/31/2023

Today I cleaned off the bones and found owl pellets. I am leaving them overnight to soak before we organize them. I started a new project with Brian that tested how light and humidity affect mushrooms. The things we are testing are one mushroom that will be in more direct sunlight another that is in less direct sunlight one is in a completely dark box with no light and the other one is in a mushroom growing humidity chamber that is optimal for growth. They are all getting the same amount of water, I am doing these tests to get good at growing mushrooms which leads to the next part of this project which is going to be growing microgreens and parrying them with different types of mushrooms to see how it affects the plants growth. I will go into more detail about what this other project entails when it is time to grow everything.

9/5/2023

Today Brian and I started by checking on the mushrooms. The mushroom block inside of the growing chamber grew substantially while the other ones stayed pretty small. Then we went on to set up the brine shrimp tank. It did not come with the heater or the airline so we had to buy them ourselves. We already had an airline so we installed that now all we need is a heater so that our brine shrimp will hatch. I am setting up the brine shrimp hatchery for the fish so that they can have food when they come. My next project will be growing microgreens.

9/7/2023

This class we got the heater for the brine shrimp tank. We set it to 85F (which is what brine shrimp hatch at ) and dumped in two scoops of brine shrimp eggs. Our mushrooms also grew a lot more. The one in the mushroom growing tank might be a little starved of oxygen. I wonder if that’s why it is only growing one way. The one with no light has barely grown at all and the one in direct sunlight has not grown either. But the ones in the shade are. When my micro greens and soil come I will cut off a piece of the mushrooms and put it in the dirt and see what happens. I hope my fish come soon.

9/14/2023

Today Brian found almost all of our brine shrimp dead. We think they died because there were too many of them and there was a bunch of junk at the bottom of the tank. We restarted the population with less shrimp and more water. Tomorrow the new fish come so the brine shrimp need to be ready to feed them. Brian and I have started a new project because we finished putting the mouse skeleton back together. So we started a new project where we will see how global warming affects mole crabs. We will do this by making small tanks and making each of them different temperatures to see if it affects how the sand crabs move around and how deep they tunnel. It won’t be very hot so they won’t get hurt but it will be enough to cause some amount of change.

10/2/2023

For the past two weeks, we have focused on our plants and seeing how much shrooms affect them. I was sick for a week so I missed a bunch of the plants growing. Our brine shrimp all died again. I think that it is because of the fish food going bad at the bottom. We plan on getting some touch tank animals and restarting the brine shrimp.

10/3/2023

Brian and I today reset the brine shrimp population we checked up on our plants and I took time laps of the tanks. I fed the fish and we watched the snail move across the whole saltwater tank! We are researching more about the tough tank we have already found one of the animals for it.

10/23/2023

Over the past 3 weeks, we have done a few things. We have set up a mushroom grow tank and a tomato plant that we will add to once they are ready to be potted. We got a bunch of new fish and found out what type of food brine shrimps need to eat.

10/31/2023

Today I noticed baby fish in the back of the freshwater tank. I can not tell yet who their parents are but I have a guess. I think it’s the two albino fish because the babies have similar coloring.

11/6/2023

We are kind of finishing off our two first projects because the fish tank is self-sustaining and the plants only require water once a day. So we are starting our new project which is taxidermy. We are going to start practicing on some animal puppets and then we will go on to do real animal fur that is humanely sourced. We have ordered the supplies to perform the taxidermy now all we have to do is practice before we try it on real pelts. The one without the mushroom might have died today.

11/6/2023

We are kind of finishing off our two first projects because the fish tank is self-sustaining and the plants only require water once a day. So we are starting our new project which is taxidermy. We are going to start practicing on some animal puppets and then we will go on to do real animal fur that is humanely sourced. We have ordered the supplies to perform the taxidermy now all we have to do is practice before we try it on real pelts. The one without the mushroom might have died today.

Owl pellets:

We took apart owl pellets and saw if we could construct a whole rat skeleton. We found a lot of the bigger bones but lost a few to the sink drain. If we ever do it again we should put a strainer to catch the bigger bones. We used super glue to glue down the bones. Next time we should use hot glue because the fumes from the super glue made our clear container not clear. Over this project turned out pretty good. I we ever do it again I want to make it more accurate.

Mushrooms and plants:

Our goal for this project was to see if mushrooms had an effect on plants and how fast they would grow. They all had the same amount of sun and water. We saw that the one that had the mushroom in it grew much bigger and faster than the one without it. We still can’t be sure that that’s why they grew so much faster but I am pretty confident that is why. When we took out the mushroom the one that had one in it stopped growing and started dying a bit. We will continue to water them but that only takes 5 minutes which is why we need a new project to spend our time on. We also had a mushroom that was eating sponges. We tried to see if we could get it to eat plastic but it died before we could start experimenting see Figure 5. We might take this project up again later in the year to make sure that our mushrooms affect how the plants grow. Next time we need to get a better watering method.

Mushrooms and plants:

Our goal for this project was to see if mushrooms had an effect on plants and how fast they would grow. They all had the same amount of sun and water. We saw that the one that had the mushroom in it grew much bigger and faster than the one without it. We still can’t be sure that that’s why they grew so much faster but I am pretty confident that is why. When we took out the mushroom the one that had one in it stopped growing and started dying a bit. We will continue to water them but that only takes 5 minutes which is why we need a new project to spend our time on. We also had a mushroom that was eating sponges. We tried to see if we could get it to eat plastic but it died before we could start experimenting see Figure 5. We might take this project up again later in the year to make sure that our mushrooms affect how the plants grow. Next time we need to get a better watering method.

Mushrooms and plants:

Our goal for this project was to see if mushrooms had an effect on plants and how fast they would grow. They all had the same amount of sun and water. We saw that the one that had the mushroom in it grew much bigger and faster than the one without it. We still can’t be sure that that’s why they grew so much faster but I am pretty confident that is why. When we took out the mushroom the one that had one in it stopped growing and started dying a bit. We will continue to water them but that only takes 5 minutes which is why we need a new project to spend our time on. We also had a mushroom that was eating sponges. We tried to see if we could get it to eat plastic but it died before we could start experimenting see Figure 5. We might take this project up again later in the year to make sure that our mushrooms affect how the plants grow. Next time we need to get a better watering method.

12/12/2023

For the past month, we have been making our poster and watering the microgreens. We did come up with some new experiments to do next see on our poster. Next semester we are going to do a lot of experiments about mushrooms.

12/14/2023

Today I worked on setting up a webcam for the freshwater fish tank. I am going to use a heat-shifting plastic to make the webcam water proof. I took some mushroom water to do experiments on.

1/2/2024

To start our first class of the new year we decided to start up our new mushroom and brine shrimp. We cut the new mushrooms into 8 different size pieces each. We put them in water to let them grow overnight and collected the mushroom spoor juice from the pink oyster mushroom. Our next steps will be to plant all of the plants and put mushrooms in 6 of the 8 planters we will be making. also test how the mushroom spore water affects asparagus ferns and philodendrons. The mushroom asparagus gets watered with 35ml of mushroom water and the other one gets 35ml of water. The philodendron gets 55ml of mushroom water and the other gets 55ml of water.

1/3/2024

Today we decided to put the soil in. We used 1500ml of Mother Earth and 1200ml of potting soil

1/25/2024

In the past weeks, we have continued our mushroom studies and worked on our inquiry pitch. We restarted the mushroom grow chamber with pink oyster mushrooms and pearl oyster mushrooms. The pink oyster mushrooms have not grown at all over the 3 weeks we have been doing it. We decided that the mushroom water was hurting the plants more than helping so we decided to stop that. After the rain a few days ago one of the mushrooms has started to grow through the burlap and they have mycelium in the soil. See the picture below to see our progress.

1/29/2023

The tomato plant has developed some fungi on its leaves. I think this happens because after the rain the leaves were wet so fungi from the air developed on them. It is supposed to rain again this week so we will see what happens with the fungi.

2/6/2024

Today our new project is making a completely self-sustaining ecosystem. We will use some sort of glass container. We will find the right type of plants and bugs. We will also use mushrooms to help the animals grow and the plants too.

2/21/2024

I have decided to get back into taxidermy. I have done this because I met with Tim Bovard the leader of taxidermy at the Natural History Museum. He gave me the tips and resources to get back into it and learn how. I am going in sometime in July to meet with him and craft a squirrel taxidermy. Right now I am working on the skeletal structures of sparrows.

3/5/2024

The new projects that we want to do after this are…

leafcutter ant colony (With a viewing area and U.V lights to shine on fungi)

Mushroom maze

Self-sustaining eco system.

3/12/2024

In our newest experiment, we are measuring if and how dirty water affects plant growth. we have 3 different species of plants one in dirty water and one in clean. In 2 months this experiment will end.

Day 1:

With dirty water:

Plant type 1 (Asparagus Fern): 100.6mm

Plant type 2 (Spider Plant): 83.5

Plant type 3 (Tradescantia Spathacea): 141.1mm

Clean water:

Plant type 1 (Asparagus Fern): 98.9mm

Plant type 2 (Spider Plant): 21.1mm

Plant type 3 (Tradescantia Spathacea): 190.4mm

3/13/2024

Day 2:

With dirty water:

Plant type 1 (Asparagus Fern): 106.7mm

Plant type 2 (Spider Plant): 100.6mm

Plant type 3 (Tradescantia Spathacea): 154.1mm

Clean water:

Plant type 1 (Asparagus Fern): 98.9mm

Plant type 2 (Spider Plant): 25.5mm

Plant type 3 (Tradescantia Spathacea): 174.5mm (Got smaller because I broke the plant)

5/9/2024

Today we decided to start the self-sustaining terrarium. In this terrarium, there will be pill bugs, moss(for food), plants for oxygen, and light to evaporate the water. the next step is getting the plants and figuring out how much water and what type of light we need to evaporate the water

5/13/2024

Today I added a fern to the self-sustaining Eco-system. I also want to add a light system into the tank so that the water evaporates faster. A seal will also be added next year so that when we add the bugs inside the tank.