Surprisingly, Meg has never made Daphnia cookies–until now!
She made my study organism too. This is clearly a Colpidium sp. that’s consumed some Serratia marscesens (those are the pink/red sprinkles), along with a colorful diversity of other bacteria:
I can only assume Meg is still working on designs for a cookie in the shape of “macroecology”, so that Brian won’t feel left out. 🙂
Dynamic Ecology 
It occurs to me that a macroecology cookie would be a massive (“large scale”) cookie. Maybe in the shape of a lognormal distribution or something? 🙂
Ooh, yes, I could do this! I have to say, the Colpidium was much more robust to transfer off the cookie sheet than the Daphnia was. The tail spine and second antennae didn’t do so well in the transfer.
Which is kind of like how these organisms are in real life. In real life, Colpidium are lab weeds, they’re very hard to kill off. Whereas I seem to recall that your Daphnia are killed off by, um, the surface of their own habitat.
I knew you’d say that! 🙂
Also, can I just say that the thought of a Daphnia bigger than a hippo is fairly terrifying? 🙂
I was waiting for someone to notice this! It’s either a terrifyingly large Daphnia or two very, very tiny hippos. I was pleased to remember that I had a hippo cookie cutter, given that hippos have been a bit of a theme in my teaching this semester. Then again, if we want to consider the effects on nutrient cycling, forget about the hippos: just think of the phosphorus requirements of a few million hippo-sized Daphnia!
Ah, that’s the way to think of it–Bosmina-sized hippos! How cute!
Well, Bosmina are already Bosmina-sized elephants, so that works. 😉
🙂