Are these microorganisms really real?

Water Sample 1: Represa Guarapiranga

In Science class, we started looking into water samples, and what can be found in a single water droplet, and we are testing three different samples to see what kind of organisms we can find in each one. The first sample was from a Represa, which was full of dirt. Inside this sample, my group found some very interesting things. Here is a sketch of the first thing we found:

This is an organism that we found, which was very hard to find. Here is why: We were looking through the sample, and all of a sudden, something passes our field of view, and we started following it. After ten minutes of trying to catch up with it since it was going so fast, we took a picture. What it looked like was a sort of snakelike shape. Something interesting about it was that whenever it moved, it would shrink and then get bigger, like it was very flexible. It was amazing! The actual microorganism was transparent, we could see through it, and inside it, there were some green circles all clenched up together in groups of four. I think that these were chloroplasts because they were green and small circles. That made me wonder why. Why would a microorganism have chloroplasts? Does it preform photosynthesis? That is one question that I would really like to find out!

The next organism we saw was a sort of circle shaped one. Here is an image:

We were looking around casually when we suddenly spotted a circle. At first, we thought it was just a piece of dirt, but then we looked closely and found out it was orange! It did not look like any other microorganism we found! For it not to leave, because it started moving just a little, we zoomed in to get a better view of it before it left. It was a circle with a sort of jelly like substance around it. We looked at our information sheet and thought it looked like the didinium cyst, and it did! It was cool how it looked like it was the center of attention since there was nothing surrounding it, and it looked like some dirt was an “audience”. It also looked very much like an eye, a human eye. That made me think that it should be somewhat related to us, since it looked like an eye. In addition, it looked like it was sucking in some small circles, and maybe some super small bacteria. That got me even more interested, and then I thought, “Well it eats just like us!” Then I remembered its color, and that got me confused. I am still trying to find out why it was orange, maybe because it has something to do with an onion since there was some orange in an onion cell, but I am still not sure! However, onions are not animals like we are, so this microorganism is very mysterious. In this microorganism, all I saw that might look like some cell parts were some circles inside it. Nothing actually looked like a cell part, with one exception. There was this circle in the middle of everything, and it was big. I thought and thought, and then it hit me. What if it was the nucleus of the organism? Is that possible?

The third organism we found was moving too quickly, so we did not really have time to take a picture of it or draw it, but we saw it twice after not finding it again. This is how it looked like: So we were looking around trying to find a third organism, and all we saw was dirt. Then, there was just this huge piece of dirt, and we got frustrated that we didn’t find anything new. Then, all of a sudden, this huge piece of dirt moves. It was amazing, because it was so fast. When it moved, it rather did the same thing the first organism we found did, but it was so big. Unlike other dirt, this was black, and moved so quickly! We were impressed. That was why it was so hard to catch it! In this microorganism, it was hard to find any cell parts since it was so dark and moved so quickly.

Overall, this was an awesome experiment, and I am so excited to see what we are going to explore next class!