fairfolio
Saved Projects

The Effects of Harmful Bacteria on Ocean Plankton

CSEF · 2003 Environmental Science (Junior Division Only)

Dane L. McFadden · St. Paul's Parish Day School, Ventura

Overview

Objectives/Goals My objective was to see if the amount of harmful bacteria in the ocean effects the plankton population. Methods/Materials To answer my purpose question I collected data in the field and used information published by an organization called Heal the Bay. This information gives weekly grades for several beaches in Ventura County, based on how much harmful bacteria is in the water. For a period of 6 weeks I took water samples from four beaches using a plankton net attached to the end of a 1.6m fiberglass pole. I counted the amount of plankton in each sample using a dissecting scope and then calculated the amount of plankton that would be in one cubic meter of water. I compared the grade from Heal the Bay with the calculated amount of plankton derived from the water samples. Results I found that the amount of harmful bacteria in the water does not seem to effect the plankton population. Conclusions/Discussion The amount of bacteria in the water does not seem to effect the plankton population. The information on my graphs shows no correlation between the amount of bacteria and the plankton population. I noticed large changes in the amount of plankton after unusually hot or cold weeks. Some ideas that have arisen, which I could study in the future, are the effects of the temperature and weather on plankton populations.

Summary statement

Today, pollution is a big problem and some kinds of pollution put harmful bacteria into the ocean, and so I wanted to see if this kind of bacteria and the other pathogens indicated by their presence are harmful to plankton.

Help received

My mother provided transportation; my father advised me on my project and provided transportation; Marilyn McFadden (my aunt and a marine biologist) gave advice on counting plankton.

Competition history

  • CSEF 2003 Environmental Science (Junior Division Only) · Entry J0921

Resources

Related projects

Closest projects by meaning, across every fair and year in the corpus.

Browse more like this

Source: California Science & Engineering Fair public projects

Save projects to your library

Sign in with Google to keep track of projects you find interesting, organized into folders. An account also raises your daily allowance for “Has this been done?”, and lets you create a key for the MCP server with a much higher limit than anonymous use. Browsing stays public.

Continue with Google