3-D Composition, Spring 2010

Bdelloid Rotifer's innards are taking shape, as in 3-D, during this home class time. Taking some license with colors in keeping with using recycled. So far bag colors come from Great Harvest, Fanatis pita bread, Alvarado St. Bakery flax bread, and Plaskolite plexiglass sheet protector. The "eyes" and stomach are Xmas tissue. Her seltzer water bottle "foot" is in place.

3-D Composition, Spring 2010

Bdelloid Rotifer innards have a design flaw: in attempts to use recycled materials as much as possible, the lateral intellarium canals cut and pasted from a bread bag, fell out of place when weights were removed. Elmer's School Paste—a bottle on hand for years—would not hold the rolled plastic pieces in place.

In the photo, the "spine" of the rotifer has gut organs layout painted in acrylic, from small containers of colors purchased from Wal-Mart, originally used to paint drawer pulls during my apartment renovation.

The roitfer is looking....spare, at this point. It has to have rolls and folds like the Pillsbury doughboy, only clear, not fleshy.

3-D Composition, Spring 2010

Dbdelloid Rotifers - tiny, leach-like creatures found in mud and water pools, have survived for ~80 million years without sex. Now, here's a creature worth exploring! Watching a NPR, Science Friday video of their asexual evolution—made for non-scientific consumption—got me hooked on making a mock-up of same.

http://www.sciencefriday.com/videos/watch/10266

Compiled a small sheaf of printable information on rotifers that leaves one admiring these females who have existed fine-thank-you-very-much for a very long time without a man around. Various posts by readers, including musing whether or not these asexuals tend propagate in water features around Catholic churches, makes learning even more enjoyable by adding to the scientific data, asking pertinent questions or just being silly.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/03/the-weird-sisters/