Home | How was Mirror Lake formed? | What lives in Mirror Lake? |How did everything get there? | What is ecology? |
Fungi can be found almost anywhere on Earth. They vary in size. Some are microscopic but some can be heavier than a dog or a sheep. They fit into the ecosystem because they decompose dead plants and animals. Here is fungi "eating" the remains of a fish underwater. Click on picture for close-up.(Tori, grade 6) This is a picture of fungi eating a dead fish. The gelatin looking substance is the fungi. THe fungi can live until it runs out of food. It can not be seen with the naked eye, so, you need a microscope to see them. It will fit into the ecology by eating dead animals or organisms and returning the nutrients to be used again by plants. (Hannah and Yi, grade 6)
Bacteria are tiny and special equipment such as a scanning electron microscope is required to get photographs like the ones on this page. You could fit millions of them inside the period at the end of this sentence.
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The salmonella bacteria in the above image are one of the older life forms on Earth. In Mirror Lake the primary role of bacteria is that of decomposer. If nothing in Mirror Lake decomposed it would eventually look like a trash land fill! Bacteria can be one of three types depending on how they tolerate oxygen: Aerobic bacteria require oxygen for their respiration and are the bacteria most commonly encountered. Anaerobic bacteria cannot tolerate the presence of oxygen. They inhabit dark airless places under the surface of the mud or deep in the soil. Facultative anaerobes can exist in the presence of oxygen but can also live without it. Bacteria are also classified as heterotroph or autotroph depending on the way they acquire food. Heterotrophs get their food from dead or living organisms. Autotrophs can make their food using chlorophyll and sunlight such as the cyanobacteria in the image below.
The cyanobacteria in the above image were thought to have given Earth its first oxygen atmosphere and are always present in Mirror Lake. Most cyano bacteria were formerly called blue-green algae. |
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Home | What is ecology? | What lives in Mirror Lake?| How was Mirror Lake formed?How did everything get there? | Resources | Animalia | Animalia2 | Fungi/Monera | Protista | Plantae |
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