I’ve been wondering about this lately, and I don’t think anyone’s asked about this before. How would you determine when microorganisms (and related organisms) you bring inside to observe become captive/cultivated? To elaborate, I like to take samples from the environment (water samples, soil sample…

Red this https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/long-term-observation-of-a-pond-water-community-casual-or-not/11381/21

I think a good way to tell is whether or not the microorganism arrived onto the media it is on naturally or if it was added there through anthropogenic means. For example, the oomycete you describe in your post is wild because it presumably arrived on the mosquito exuvia naturally. Conversely, E. co…

Yeah, I think anything you put there is captive (e.g. everything in a closed system from somewhere else, as in the thread above), whereas anything that comes in unintentionally afterwards is wild. So I’d consider anything in our fish tank wild other than the fish in it. Algae, plankton, snails, etc. …

Microorganisms- when are they captive?

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dep May 10, 2020, 1:33pm 4

Ah, thanks! I didn’t come across that thread while searching, but it’s clearly nearly the same issue. I’ll continue the conversation there.

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Microorganisms- when are they captive?

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