As it stands, we have barely even started our pre-trials. Despite our best efforts, we have fallen sorely behind, but we are doing our best to catch up. On the second day of pre-trials, all of our Daphnia Magna samples died, so we were unable to collect any data. Immediately after they died, we ordered new samples, but they did not come in until yesterday. Today, we are planning on starting to collect data again, and will update this blog post once we have more to discuss. 10/28 UPDATE: We have now completed our pre-trials, and have decided to use the data we collected as our data for the final data analysis. Below are pictures of Daphnia Magna samples taken through the microscope lens, as well as some pictures of our setup.
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To find our research topic, we searched for biology experiments on google. We looked at many experiments before we found a topic that seemed interesting. The moment we saw this experiment we knew it was perfect for us. Heidi is interested in cardiology and how she can help fight diseases that originate in the heart and Noah's family has a history of high blood pressure, so it was relevant to both research partners.
Our sources have given us a lot of insight on how blood pressure medication and variations of green tea affect the heart rate of a human and helped us hypothesize what the effect of these substances will be on the heartbeat of dahpnia magna. Google scholar is a great resource for finding professional research projects and resources regarding cardiology and what effects heart rate. For our experiment we are going to use a pipette to drip three different solutions on to the daphnia. Then we will put the slide containing the daphnia and the solution under a microscope. By looking into a microscope we will be able to locate the heart of the daphnia and record the number of times it beats per minute. We will then compare the effects of the three different solutions on the heart rate. To make sure our data is unbiased we will include a control group of daphnia which will have no solution dripped on them so we can record the average normal heart rate of daphnia magna. We plan to test the process of our experiment in a pre-trial run in order to rule out any issues in keeping the daphnia alive or fixing the amounts of medication we use. We then are going to take a week to run the experiment and record our observations. In order to get advice, we have contacted John Clare, author of a highly detailed website regarding dahnia magna (http://www.caudata.org/daphnia/). |
AuthorWe are high school seniors at MMSTC studying the effect of different blood pressure treatments on the common water flea. ArchivesCategories |