A Year of Samples at Hollow Creek Park

Four Visits to the Nature Center

1Hollow Creek Park is a city park with a pond, a lawn, rows of maple and crabapple trees and a small nature center. Ranger Oksana Petrenko runs a microscope club there for middle schoolers. This year, the club visited once each season. Each time, members collected small samples around the park and looked at them at 400× magnification. Sixth grader Dario Fujimoto kept the club's sample log.

2In winter, the maple trees were bare. The club cut a thin slice through a brown maple bud. Tough scale cells covered the outside, and inside were tiny folded leaves made of small cells packed tightly together. The club also scraped feathery frost off a bench rail, but on the slide it quickly melted into clear drops. When the club came back in spring, the buds on the same branch had opened into small leaves.

3In spring, the pond held clumps of frog eggs. Ranger Petrenko placed one newly laid egg in a dish of pond water and the club watched it through a magnifier all morning. At first the egg inside its clear jelly was a single round cell. Then a groove split it in two, and the splitting went on. Two weeks later, the club looked at the clear tail of a tadpole from the same pond.

4In summer, green threads floated at the edge of the pond. At 400×, cell walls divided each thread into a chain of boxy cells, and every cell held its own green spiral and a nucleus. The cells all looked alike.

5In fall, a white film covered some fallen crabapples. It held single oval cells, each with a nucleus, and some had a small bud growing on one side. A mushroom had popped up on the lawn, and a thin slice of its stalk showed long, threadlike cells packed side by side. Dario also looked at a chip of old paint from a park bench.