Jack and Holly's plankton

Our plankton was pretty small and thin and we based it off the first diatom that we looked at called the pinnularia. We tried to make it small and pretty uncomplicated so that it was easy to adjust. We used the needle as a weight and it also allowed us to attach other things to the plankton. We used parts of packing peanuts to add buoyancy  to our plankton. And towards the end we started to add very small amounts of clay to the needle to try and make it heavier to make it neutrally buoyant in the water. One way our plankton reflects some of the adaptations of real plankton is that we added things to make it neutrally buoyant just as real plankton have adapted to become neutrally buoyant so that they drift through the water. We tried to make our plankton a long and skinny shape, so that like real plankton, it could drift around the water without being pushed around too harshly by the currents.