We're trying to figure out why some eggs become chickens and others don't. We have a good take on fertilization (from sexual education class), but we're not really sure exactly how the chicken develops after that. We brainstormed some things we could do to figure out exactly how the chick develops inside the egg, and we wanted to use the microscopes to look at:
1. The germinal disc
2. The yolk and white
3. The membrane
We thought through each of these things to spend our time wisely...what would each of them reveal to us? We also realized that we think the germinal disc starts this whole process. We didn't have any germinal discs (that were fertilized), so our next best steps were the blood of a chicken, since we seem to see blood appear first around the germinal disc in a developing egg. Mrs. Brinza was able to get some bird blood slides for us at a nearby science store, so it seemed like the logical place to start! Here's what we saw when we looked at bird blood under the microscope:
1. The germinal disc
2. The yolk and white
3. The membrane
We thought through each of these things to spend our time wisely...what would each of them reveal to us? We also realized that we think the germinal disc starts this whole process. We didn't have any germinal discs (that were fertilized), so our next best steps were the blood of a chicken, since we seem to see blood appear first around the germinal disc in a developing egg. Mrs. Brinza was able to get some bird blood slides for us at a nearby science store, so it seemed like the logical place to start! Here's what we saw when we looked at bird blood under the microscope:
We saw these little red dots appear with this yellowish/whitish background, as as we magnified them more, we happened to see that each of these red dots seemed to have a dark center and a ring around them. We're thinking these are cells! After digging a little deeper and seeing a real blood sample right after a draw and then after some time to settle, we saw this:
Our research is also telling us that blood is more than just these red blood cells and contains plasma, a mixture of water, dissolved food molecules, and nutrients. We're starting to wonder if other chicken parts, or other parts of other living organisms also contain these cells, too. We're thinking we can look at some parts of chickens under the microscope and parts of us (someone suggested a cheek swab). Stay tuned...as we try to figure out if other things are made of cells, too.