My hypothesis is that dissolved Phosphate will change for the total phosphorus when left under a light. I believe that suspended phosphorus has the biggest impact on the eutrophication of lakes. When there is an increase of phosphorus in lakes, this leads to and increase in phytoplankton. This then leads to a decrease in water clarity. The reason that this is relevant is because eutrophication is when a body of water receives excess nutrients which results in excessive algae growth (ISP 217 Lab 4 Part 1).
Asking a question like what is in the controlled water sample. The reason that this element is important because we needed to know what kind of water we were dealing with which was fish tank water. The design of the experiment is very important also because in this experiment we needed to realize what would cause the different effects for the experiment such as the combinations of organisms in each flask. We needed to know what the effects that daphnia had on algae growth.
Lastly sampling is important because you need to be able to take the right measurements and the right amounts of sampling so we are discovering all aspects of the experiment. Taking each dose and filtering it helped see if phosphorus would have an effect on each of the three flasks by taking one sample of non filtered water and one with filtered water. I think for both of the graphs show that the treatment with the algae and daphnia was something to definitely look at.
There was a significant difference between the initial and final that is very high in scientific interest. But I believe it is also of scientific interest that the flask with just algae showed that there wasn’t much change in the total phosphorus but there was a significant change in the phosphate. The changes occurred because the daphnia ate the algae leaving less nutrients in the water which phosphorus is made up of. Although the means show that there was a significant ifference in the algae and daphnia flask, the standard deviation shows that there is a large amount of positive error for those final calculations. One would think as to why there is such a large range of error in the standard deviations for those reduced means. Suspended phosphorus is made up of particles in organisms such as algae zooplankton etc. Since this phosphorus is in particles, in the algae only flask, the phosphate is stored in the algae (ISP 217 Lab 4 Part 1).
As the water level would reduce to do evaporation, there would be less mass or less area for the nutrients which would cause more of an algae growth since the nutrients would be closer together and produce more algae. It is all apart of the food cycle. The algae gets eaten by daphnia which then gets eaten by other living things that are in the ocean. For this experiment the daphnia ate the algae resulting in less phosphorus in the water. Since there were no daphnia in the other two flasks there was not much of a difference in the phosphorus count.
