Card 3 - "Green stars" and "half bricks"
The "sugar makers" are chloroplasts, the cell organelles containing chlorophyll which carry out photosynthesis (making food from carbon dioxide and water, using light energy).
A bit of word derivation: Zygnema is from the Greek, zygon - yoke and nema - thread.
It's been a long time since I did any pond dipping, maybe a future project would be to collect some pond scum, put it under the microscope and shine lights from different directions and to see if the chloroplast movement is observable.
Something completely different... I am reading Diane Ackerman's The moon by whale light, in which she says that it is the temperature of the eggs that determines the sex of baby crocodiles. This I knew, but what I hadn't considered is that as sex is not determined genetically, crocodiles don't have sex chromosomes.
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