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Low Nutrient Experiment

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Before starting the experiment we believed that the high light and high nutrient treatment would cause bacteria to grow more quickly because it had all resources available for the bacteria to be successful in having a high growth rate and doubling time. This sample would experience the least amount of limitations. With that being said, the expected treatment with the lowest growth and doubling rate would have to be the low light and low nutrient treatment. It was seen that in comparison to low and high nutrients, there was a significant difference in growth rate when using a high nutrient sample. When comparing high/low light using a low nutrient sample, there was no significant difference between the data (Table 4). This may mean that light was not a major contributing factor when in a low nutrient environment. When looking at effects of nutrients, we ran comparisons with the same light intensity. We saw that there was no significant difference between low and high nutrients in neither low or high light (Table 5). This does not fully support our hypothesis because the comparison of highlight/low nutrient v. high light/ high nutrients …show more content…

Since phytoplankton live in a variety of environments, future studies can factor in comparisons of different species of phytoplankton and see how treatments such as these affect each one. Continuing using controlled studies is important. Using actual physical environments can pose problems. These problems could stem from unpredictable weather, oceanographic conditions, and hard to define taxonomy of these phytoplankton (Cloern and Nichols 1985). If studies continue to us the phytoplankton chlorophyte, Tetraselmis spp. , you can add in the factor of salinity into the experiment. This species is known to withstand many different salinity levels (Fabregas et. al.1984) and seeing how that might affect data would be an interesting path future studies can

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