Where's the Plankton?

Overview

Objectives/Goals My objective in this project was to find out how and where plankton is most abundant in the Newport Harbor, California. I sampled bay water in five different locations including the Balboa Pier, the West Jetty, the Turning Basin, the Back Bay Bridge , and the Rhine Channel. My hypothesis was that there would be more plankton in the Rhine Channel than anywhere else because of less water flow caused by the tide. Methods/Materials 1. One jar for every location sampled 7. Snap swivel 2. Strong Wire 8. Stong Microscope 3. A pair of panty hose 9. Blank slides and covers 4. One embroidery hoop 10. Tissue to wipe slides 5. Three to five strong rubber bands 11. Notebook 6. A small jar or vile for the net 12. camera Results After sampling all of the locations, I went back home to start to observe. I would stir the sample with a spoon and would put a drop of water on a slide. After looking over the slide through the microscope, I gave it a rating. A - very dense, B - Dense, C - medium and D - low density, and E - none or almost none. After doing this five times for each jar of water, I came up with an average rating. The Rhine Channel ended up with a rating of A - very dense. I also learned from research that plankton prefer calm water. Conclusions/Discussion It turned out that my hypothesis was correct. I thought that out of all the samples I observed, the Rhine Channel stood out the most. There was plankton everywhere on the slide. The plankton were more dense in this area because the flow of water is not very strong like it is in other more open areas of the bay. This abundancy of phytoplankton attracts zooplankton such as jelly fish. This increases the population of plankton.

Awards (1)

• Honorable Mention

Competition history

• CSEF 2008 Microbiology · Entry J1419

Resources

• CSEF project summary ↗

Related projects

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

Browse more like this

• All Microbiology projects
• CSEF Microbiology projects
• Every CSEF 2008 project