The project „Extracting Tardigrades from moss with a Baermann Funnel“ gives informations about microscopics animals, which are also known as water bears and gives basic instructions on how to extract them. During my bachleor studies I realized, that Tardigrades are unknown for most of the students I’ve met. And that is why I decided to focus on these interesting animals and introduce them to the students. This DIY is a movement that consists of making biology at class with almost no special tools involved, so it could be used by teachers to be creative with their students and to show them, how easily they can extract Tardigrades. It is also very nice way, how to start the Invertebrae topic and inspire students to learn new things.
The main goal of this project was to assamble the Baermann funnel, so we could extract Tardigrades and examine them later under the microscope. The Baermann funnel is easy to built with just a few objects, which most of them are used daily in our hoseholds (such as pen holder, funnel or sifter).
The whole process of making this project is really simple and fast, the only thing I find difficult, is to find the right moss. It doesn´t matter which kind of moss it is, sometimes it’s just really hard to find the one, where the Tardigrades are- that is why I personally prefer samples from countryside, over the samples from polluted city.
All the footage was taken with the Olympus XZ-10 using a stabilizer tripod.
By Zuzana Gruntová