Week 12

This week there is not a whole lot of changes to the eco column. The Terrestrial chamber continues to grow to a point where it is outgrowing the camber. When I look at the camber from the outside, it looked like the soil was very dry but when I took the top off the camber, there was a lot of moisture inside the column. The reason for this is because of the different temperatures inside and outside the eco column. Just as when cold winds collide with warm winds to produce storms in the world, the collision between the cold temperatures outside of the bottle and the warmer temperatures found inside the eco column. The temperatures is higher then the outside temperature because of the lights that acts as a source of light and a source of heat. This effect is like the green house effect and the earth. The green house effect is when the earth absorb the heat from the sun and releases some of the heat back out into the atmosphere but not all the heat is released into space because particles in the atmosphere blocks the heat from escaping the atmosphere of the earth. Relating that to the eco column, the lamp acts like a sun to provide heat and energy, the plastic wall around the eco column acts like the atmosphere prevent some of the heat from being released back into the classroom which acts as space. With the collision of warm and cold temperatures, moisture is releases back into the system and hence there is very little water require to keep the system from dying.

The decomposition camber is doing well fruit fly wise because the plants seems to have stopped growing but the fruit flies seems to be doing well. Fruit flies grew very quickly over the pass few days. The first time I introduce the fruit fly into the column, there were only five that was released inside the decomposition, now there are over thirty of them.


The aquatic section of the eco column remains the same from all the other weeks because there is really no changed aside from the minnow slightly getting bigger since he has been alive all this time.








I think I managed to catch one male and two female. I notice that the two new turtles have red ears on them and the original one does not have any red marking on it's ears, I am guessing that they might be two different species.