You know, I am trying to follow this thread and you guys are speaking well above my blonde brain, but did you say your basement is flooded with water? You waded into your basement to mess with your cultures?
You are in Colorado? Does this happen frequently?
'Tis true, unfortunately. We had a heavy snowpack this year. A couple of weeks ago we had several days of high temps, so the whole snowpack started heading down the mountains at once. (So much so that the powers-that-be closed our local water source to the college inner-tubers because the water flow is too strong.) Then we had a freak cold front come through and give us about seven days of constant strong rains. There weren't any active leaks into our basement, the water table just rose up and started seeping in from below. But it was 85 and dry yesterday and the water started receding already. A couple more days of that and we should be good to go. I found out something fun, though. We have a floor drain and sump pump, but it looks like they installed the floor drain into the _highest_ part of the floor. So the rest of the room has to fill up with water before anything goes down the drain. Grr. There are a couple of steps up from that basement to our fishroom, so the fishies are fine. But, the flood is a confluence of bad events. Which seems to describe the year I'm having pretty well.
Filtering algae is pasive,the copepod generating some flow which brings the food to the mouth.
I'll take your word for it. That sounds like an active process to me (generating flow, choosing prey size, etc.). How does one know if the copepod is not actively choosing sites in which to filter feed? But the Drs. are saying that the copepods need different techniques to take down active prey. I can go with that.
I can usually find an incredibly small protist contaminant in my cultures, but I've never seen any larger ciliates. I guess there's something good about living far from the sea.
