Microscopic Biodiversity in the Bow River

CYSF · 2025

Leopold Peck, Thomas Thiessen · Our Lady of the Assumption School

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Overview

Biodiversity is the variety of all living things and their interactions. It represents the total variety of life on earth. Our project demonstrates the differences in organisms between moving water and still water. From the Bow River

Problem

We were comparing samples from two types of water to see what different organisms and how many orginisms there are between still and moving water. We guessed that the still water would have more microorganisms because of the vegetation in the area and the conditions of the water.

Method

Our method was to collect the water from moving water ( the bow river) and still water (a pond in bowmont). We put a small drop of water onto a slide and looked through a microscope to identify what we saw. We had 3 slides from each water sample. Then we compared what we saw on the microscope and compared it to a similar microorganism picture online. If we agreed it was that organism we found online we charted it down.

Research

Our research project introduces Biodiversity and the different organisms between still and moving water. The research helped us find what different organisims were in the water and why there were more organisms in the still water then the moving water. The research also helped because it gave us more details about the topic and the different types of biodiversty. Our research included our samples, our observations of the area of where we got our samples, Google image searches and talking with our science teacher.

Data

Bow River / moving water Scroll down Bowmont / still water

Slide 1 Slide 1

Spirochates Water Mold Euglena Euglena Spirochaetes Water Mold

Slide 2 Slide 2

Concentric Rings Euglena Marine microbes Proteobacteria Spirochaetes Stained Bacteria

Slide 3 Slide 3

Bacillius Water Mold Euglena Euglena Water Mold

Conclusion

We found out that there are more organisms in still water than moving water. This is likely because of the vegetation and the wildlife that surrounds the still water. The moving water had less microorganisms because it likely had less nutrients near the river rock bottom and it was very shallow.

We also realized that we collected our still water sample from a water filtration system. A future study could look at water from the start of the system and comparing it to water at the clean part of the system and see how much the system cleaned the water from the start. Another future study could also see what microorganism causes th most harm and what causes the least amount of harm to other living things.

We thought we would see about 20 organisms but there were way more. There were a lot of microrganisms that we could not identify. To solve that we could find experts who study these type of different organisms. We could get also a better microscope to find out better details.