An Ecocolumn is an incredible middle-school activity. It is very exciting and I learned a lot and had fun.
An Ecocolumn is made up of a terrarium and the aquarium. The Terrarium is the land part and the Aquarium is the water part.
To build the Ecocolumn, we first brought in recycled soda bottles and we planted alfalfa, grass, and mustard in the terrarium.
We learned how these plants are all important to our ecocolumn. Later we observed our plants. They had grown healthy, green, tall and strong. It was cool to see how the plants had changed.
Then we put live animals such as isopods (roly-polies) and crickets into the terrarium. I had to be careful so I wouldn’t hurt the animals.
I then learned about respiration. Respiration is the exchange of gasses. For example, plants help animals live by exhaling carbon dioxide, which the plant needs to perform photosynthesis. The plant releases oxygen, which animals need to breathe.
After I set up the aquarium, we put plants like duckweed, chara, and algae into the aquarium.
Duckweed is a plant that floats on the surface of the water and has small fronds (they’re like its leaves). If it overgrows, it will block out all the sunlight and the other plants will die. Luckily, ducks love to eat duckweed. That’s how it got its name.
Algae can be green, brown, red and gold. If there is too much algae in the water, there will be little oxygen in the water and animals could die. This is called an algae bloom.
Chara and elodea are very adaptive. They can live in warm and cold water. If you cut chara in half both pieces will still grow. It can grow in the ground or just float in the water. This hardy plant is so adaptive that it easily clogs up waterways.
Even though the plants all have a downside, they are still very important to the ecosystem. Fish eat the chara, ducks feed on the duckweed and snails need the algae to eat.
Our class learned about dependent and interdependent relationships between organisms and how they contribute to an ecosystem. For example, a fish needs a plant for food and the plant needs the fish to eat it so it doesn’t overgrow and kill other plants and animals.
Do you know what the best thing about the Ecocolumn is? It’s that you do not need to care for it. The water in the aquarium evaporates into the terrarium giving the land plants water. Then that water moves back down into the aquarium taking some of the soil nutrients, which helps the water plants grow better. The fish eat some of those plants and poops, which is like fertilizer to the water plants helping them grow. It is a cycle.
At the end of the unit we learned about pollution and how it hurts ecosystems. A pollutant is something that when too much of it is released into an ecosystem, it is bad for the organisms living there.
Acid rain can kill plants, which affects animals that eat plants. Road salt can be very harmful to an ecosystem because it “burns” plant leaves. Fertilizer goes on runoff into bodies of water. This pollutant pollutes the water and can be very harmful to organisms living there.
Making ecocolumns was an incredible experiment and I will never forget it.
WenKai Fitzgerald is a Lynnfield Middle School fifth grader.
