Building the Biosphere

Biosphere coming together!

Willa's class is studying life systems. As part of the study, Willa was tasked with building a biosphere to study and document for the next few weeks. Via Pinterest, we found some great directions (HERE, then follow the links).

Our first task was collecting three empty 2 liter bottles. Willa and Cam canvassed the neighborhood - thanks to our neighbors Larry & Jeannette for the mini-ecosystem home!

I was deep into mulching and taking care of baby hostas, so this project was really a Jamey-Willa-Cam project. They made a trip to PetCo for guppies, snails and crickets. Willa harvested earth worms from my hosta-transplanting locations and Cam collected brown leaves and rocks.

The biosphere has been at school now for almost a week. Within the first day, two guppies died. But we put in four guppies with the assumption that there might be a tragic beginning to life. Willa reported on Friday that the snails were eating the fish carcasses and she'd found the leftover bones floating in the pond. Circle of life in action!

The class is also monitoring a small pool of tadpoles and their most exciting recent addition was crayfish. Willa is quite excited to be in the group hosting only one of two crayfish in the class! I've heard there are plans to try to get the crayfish to mate. I haven't asked her how they're going to go about this task yet.

Snails moving in.

Closing it the biosphere.