I finally got some pictures of a tank I setup at an urban high school where my I have a 10 hour-a-week fellowship through the National Science Foundation GK-12 program. We set this up in October, I've been really impressed how long things have lived. Pretty much all taxa that I've put in there have survived. I stocked it lightly with leaves and have been putting in sinking fish food. Seems to be enough for thing to get by on... Maybe I'm just deceiving myself and I'm slowly starving them to death. But things are molting through instars and stuff. So I dunno.
The tank is extremely low maintenance. Mainly top off and then a quick 50% water change every couple months.
The kids love the snails, probably because they can see them (it's hard to get excited about corbicula, I'm sure). But every now and then, if I have a student interested, I'll flip a rock and we'll see who is under there. Sometimes, I get lucky and it's the hellgrammite, other times a stonefly jets off, and then sometimes, there's just nothing there. I think that's what they like the most about this. Suspense. And then the shriek
The aquarium setup (nothing glamorous!)
aquarium.jpg 137.07KB 6 downloads
Web-weaving caddisfly larvae
caddisfly_01.jpg 129.09KB 5 downloads
Corbicula (asiatic clam)
corbicula_02.jpg 145.77KB 6 downloads
Gilled snail
gilled_snail_02.jpg 83.33KB 3 downloads
Hellgrammite (dobsonfly larvae)
hellgrammite_04.jpg 173.6KB 3 downloads
Limpet
limpet_01.jpg 106.13KB 3 downloads
Mayfly larvae
mayfly_01.jpg 165.15KB 2 downloads
Pouch snail (exotic Physella acuta from aquarium trade)
physid_snail_06.jpg 141.88KB 1 downloads
Planaria
planaria_02.jpg 83.38KB 3 downloads
Ramshorn snail
ramshorn_snail_04.jpg 101.85KB 1 downloads
Water penny
water_penny.jpg 178.68KB 3 downloads
Todd
Edited by farmertodd, 17 January 2010 - 08:00 PM.