Week 4

For the first two days of week 4, the catus stood it's ground amidst all the dead plants surrounding it. It wouldn't take long for it to die. I believe this occurred because of the size of the cactus, which can't go that much without water. Eventhough the experiment wasn't completely successful, it serves as a good learning experience. Based on the four weeks, I've come to the conclusion that the main issue was the water supply, followed by the species we chose and our format for the lab.

Week 3

Week 3 struck like lightning and killed most of our mesocosm. The cactus is a lone survivor, but it is also starting to show signs of not lasting. The mai thing that went wrong was the water supply. Maybe if we had used some sort of pump to get the water circulating and always delivered to the whole mesocosm we would have had a longer lasting experiment. My predictions for week 4 are not the best, hopefully the cactus will handle it.

Week 2

Over the course of week 2 some plants started to die and the snail was already dead. This was due to failure in our water system which stopped providing a reliable source of water. The cactus continues to strive and seems to be staying until the end of the project

Week 1 photos

Week 1

During week one our mesocosm was stable. The organisms were able to handle their new surroundings although the snail started showing signs of a worse condition. The cactus, for being a plant that doesn´t need a lot of water, is the best one to handle the mesocosm so far.

Overall Idea

The purpose of this lab was to try create a mesocosm where living organisms would be able to survive over the course of 1 month. Each group would create thei own mesocosm out of recycled material and select wich living organisms would be found inside. For my group, the selected organisms were 5 different species of plants and a snail.