nice going! And great pix and focus for a first try! I'm really wowed!
the 1st 3 pix seem to be at 400x total mag - in that case, in the first pic you're seeing a bacterial aggregate and them working on some OM.
in the second, in the bottom right quadrant there's a longish rod, that's a proper Bacillus (=genus, not just the shape), the dots are distinctive and can appear in different places and numbers, but I don't identify beyond that, as it's just the kind of player that will give me the indication of yes, good one, want to have.
(and actually, the brown 2-part sticklike thing all covered in fulvic goo in the upper left quadrant
could be a bit of hypha, one would have to focus up and down a bit to see if one can see the contours, septae, and the breakline on the ends - if it were one, it would be classed as a very beneficial one!)
Paired with the bacilli-chains on the 3rd pic, and the general appearance of the aggregates at lower magnification in the nematode pic (fuzzy wuzzy looking), we get a very rod-shape dominant picture, which I have found to correlate with the appearance of clearly anaerobic players, though there are still other bacterial morphologies around too. So in this combination you're looking at an ACT going anaerobic - you mentioned the protozoans "zipping", which is typical of ciliates (the oblong thing at the bottom of the nematode picture could actually be one too), and voilá your low-oxygen indicators when you see more than 1-2 per slide.
So it always also depends on the context, the numbers.
If the compost you used did have fungal populations and you see none at all in the tea (even with molasses, there's the occasional strand), another indication of low oxygen having happened: anaerobic bacteria can chew up fungal hyphae within 20 mins - they just seem to dissolve - and the confirmed pictures I've seen of this happening always had rod-shaped bacteria dominating too. So that's possibly part of why you're not seeing any fungi too.
Welcome to the world of disenchantment?
Now, getting the oxygen back in there (diluting with fresh water for example and bubbling that more)
can turn the situation back around, putting the ciliates to sleep, awakening the flagellates and other species of bacteria that may originally have been around. It's a bit tricky, because you may need to add food again too. But by just replenishing dissolved oxygen, you can at least get it back into a state where you don't have to feel bad watering it in somewhere
Yes! Definitely go for the fungal foods, my try with kelp and humic alone was eye opening and I look forward to doing more brews like that soon!
never again molasses and such!
I started with 1 cup VC + 1 tsp kelp (bubbled a while with the humic before adding the VC, though I may presoak a few hrs beforehand next time too) in 5L water, but added another tsp kelp later because not much was going on yet. So I ended up brewing 48 hrs but then had a tea with low counts of individuals but a fungal to bacterial mass ratio of 6.2 lol never seen that before (the VC was somehere at 0.7 iirc) Oh and that ACT really had an effect on the balance of one of my pot soils, raising fungal presence significantly.
The reason I'm telling you this is because we can be using way smaller
amounts of food than are generally spoken of with regards to ACT. That 1 tsp is the actual recommendation we get in the course as our
starting point for experimentation - finding juuust the right amount of our particular food (e.g. not "kelp", "THIS kelp"!) to get the kind of growth we want to see
Too much food causes too quick of a growth spurt, using up oxygen faster and thus making dips into anaerobic phases more likely.
Haha, fun stuff!
Cheers!
. Been very impressed with everyone's photos in the greenpoint thread and I'm very much looking forward to running some of this gear.... now to just make some room... and decide which strain to start first... and try not to buy any more (but likely will LOL)
