What Do Red Abalone Raised in Cabrillo Marine Aquarium's Aquatic Nursery Prefer to Eat?

Overview

Objectives/Goals For my experiment my objectives/goals were to see if Red Abalone would consume carrots and sea lettuce. Also to see which food the Abalone would consume of the most and how much in average would the Abalone consume of the carrots and the sea lettuce. Methods/Materials For my experiment, the materials I used were; a tank full of Red Abalones, Carrots, Sea Lettuce, a pitcher, a small bowl, a spatula, a timer, a scale, a pencil or pen, and a notebook. The methods I used for my experiment were first to gather carrots and sea lettuce and place the carrots in the small bowl and the sea lettuce in the pitcher. Next, I weighed one carrot and some sea lettuce in a scale and weighed each until each weighed the same amount of grams. Then, I would feed one abalone the carrot and another abalone the sea lettuce. Next, I would set my timer for twenty minutes and allowed the abalone's to consume as much as they could from each foods. After the twenty minutes I took out each piece of food out of the abalone's mouths and weigh each food to see how much they consumed of them. Finally I would write my results in my notebook and start the trial again. Results My results were that the abalone did eat both carrots and sea lettuce. Also, when finding out the average amount eaten of each foods, it resulted that the abalone ate similar average amounts of the sea lettuce and carrots. Conclusions/Discussion In conclusion, I discovered that Red Abalone will not only eat kelp, but will eat carrots and sea lettuce as well. Also that this can benefit aquariums raising Red Abalone because if there is ever a shortage on kelp, the aquarium now knows that they could feed the abalone sea lettuce or even carrots. For further investigations, I would complete more trials because the more trials, the more accurate and efficient my results would be, and instead of working with abalone I would work with another marine animal, such as a sea urchin and feed it two foods that it is uncommon with as well.

Competition history

• CSEF 2014 Zoology · Entry J2207

Resources

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