Page 9 - TBAS-Aug-2020

TBAS August 2020 .................... -9-
However, in order to determine if the salinity of the water had a negative
effect on the egg production, or if it was an issue of the environmental lighting
in the room where the study was being conducted, the study would need to be
continued.
Based on the results from my initial experiment, I’ve learned that maintaining
an isosmotic environment had been beneficial to cichlid egg production in the
beginning.
I would like to further this study and I definitely need to get more data on
a larger scale to evaluate my results. I also believe that this type of experiment
should be done on many other species so that results can be compared and better
understood.
If I am able to continue with the experiment, and in the event that my study
has the same result, I want to look into the reason why the increase of salinity
was helpful in the beginning but hindered egg production in the end.
In the event my follow-up study shows desirable results (i.e., measured
increased fecundity), the next step would be to evaluate the absolute costs of
production to see if this is an affordable way to help farmers increase their
production.

Below is a description of the design of my experiment.
Materials and Methods

1) Talk about how being an isosmotic environment is what I am trying to achieve,
I had to learn what the fish’s blood salinity was.
How did I do this?
Talk about what the Vapor Pressure Osmometer is.
Include how I took the data from the Vapor Pressure Osmometer and used an
equation to find out what the blood salinity is.
Once I learned the blood salinity of the fish, I was then able to find out how
much salt I needed to add to the test system.

2) Each system was treated the same way. I kept the water parameters to what
is required by red zebra fish (African rift lake cichlids), with the exception of the
salinity difference that I introduced in System 2.

3) The fish were all fed to satiation with a standard commercial cichlid diet.

Kryssi, this article is way above and beyond the “call of duty” . . .

this is absoutly SUPER!!! I am so very proud of you!!

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