Dirt and Maybe worms?
Mar 04, 2021 • 8:41 AM UTC
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Vishwajit
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I am from India living in the Deccan Plateau of Maharashtra. I was really curious to check out how would the special soil my Mom brought in for the plants would like under the microscope. Also, I had once separated the soil to do some science project and I found worms crawling in it a few days later. I had never seen these before and I wanted to investigate.
The soil was moist and clumped up when I took it. I broke it into smaller clumps and used the sticky slide to get some onto it. I was wondering what kind of shape I might find under the microscope. I examined it in my room under the light of my tube light.
What I found were bigger but still irregular clumps of mud. Turns out soil doesn’t have any particular structure even when zoomed in. It seemed to have an apparent magnification of about 100. I did find something similar to what I was hoping for, thin strands laced through the mud but upon further research, I found that the earthworms native to India grow to around 10-30cm so under magnification that big, what I found couldn’t be earthworms. They didn’t move no matter how long I observed them. I later found out my mom had put in some vegetables for composting so they could be the leftover of the worms who had already done their work.
The soil was moist and clumped up when I took it. I broke it into smaller clumps and used the sticky slide to get some onto it. I was wondering what kind of shape I might find under the microscope. I examined it in my room under the light of my tube light.
What I found were bigger but still irregular clumps of mud. Turns out soil doesn’t have any particular structure even when zoomed in. It seemed to have an apparent magnification of about 100. I did find something similar to what I was hoping for, thin strands laced through the mud but upon further research, I found that the earthworms native to India grow to around 10-30cm so under magnification that big, what I found couldn’t be earthworms. They didn’t move no matter how long I observed them. I later found out my mom had put in some vegetables for composting so they could be the leftover of the worms who had already done their work.
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