Pondlife - Brooklyn Botanic Garden

Pondlife

March 22, 2018 through March 2019

Pondlife, a multimedia exhibition by scientist and filmmaker Sally Warring, combines art and biology in an exploration of the microbial communities in the ponds and waterways at the Garden.

Microbes live in every environment on Earth, from the Arctic to the Amazon to your local park’s duck pond. They produce around half the world’s oxygen, degrade waste, form important symbioses with plants and animals, and have roles in our own bodies. Yet many people have never seen a microbe and don’t know what these tiny organisms do.

Explore this hidden world through the magnified photographs and videos that Warring took after collecting water samples from Brooklyn Botanic Garden.

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For this exhibit, Warring collected samples from several bodies of water around Brooklyn Botanic Garden, including the pools on Lily Pool Terrace.

A magnified photo of an Epistylis ciliate collected from one of the pools. Ciliates are a type of unicellular protist.

Warring collected a sample in the Water Garden from the forebay (upper pond) on a day when it was thick with an emerald-green slime. One of the microbes she found ther was Spirogyra.

The submerged planters on Lily Pool Terrace have been colonized by a filamentous green algae.

A magnified photo of the filamentous green algae collected from the submerged pot growing together in a mass.

Pondlife: What Lives in the Water Here?

Support

Pondlife is part of Brooklyn Botanic Garden's Green Garden, Green City initiative.

Major Sponsor, Green Garden, Green City

Image, top of page: Sally Warring