Plankton!

Plankton Mania!!!

Introduction:
Plankton is defined as organisms that cannot swim against the current. They have to drift along with the current. You may ask, Why is plankton so important? The reason is that if we didn't have them, we wouldn't have anything else in the ocean. Phytoplankton (plant plankton) is at the bottom of the food chain (or web). The phytoplankton gets it's energy from sunlight. So when other plankton and fish eat the phytoplankton they get their energy from it and so on. Now the zooplankton eat the phytoplankton. Other fish and sea creatures eat the zooplankton and that is why it is so important for us today because it lets us eat the things we do such as fish. The reason why we studied it was because it is so important to know what is all around us in the ocean.

Research:

Procedure:

1-Gather materials needed for this project such as; a refractometer, turbidity tube, digital thermometer, water bottle, microscope , plankton net, pipette, Petri dish with a grid , detain.

2-Go to your sample site, we went to the Kihei boat ramp.

3-Put your plankton net into the water and drag it through the water. Put that sample into a bottle.

4-Now take the refractometer and place 2 drops of water from testing area of the refractometer, put the plastic layer over the water and point towards the sun. Record data.

5-Take the turbidity tube and go to sample area. Fill with water and look through it until you can see the secchi disc. Record data.

6-Take the digital thermometer and put it into the water and then pull it out. Record the data in Celsius form.

7-Go back to the lab and examine your sample in a grid pitri dish and add detain, then view it under microscope with the pro scope technology and record the amount of plankton for both testing grounds.

8-For individual plankton you see that are moving too quickly, remove with pipette and put in individual container, view under compound microscope and record data.

9-Put all used material away.

We went to Kihei Boat Ramp and had a sample from Ho'okipa. Once we were there we did what the procedure above has said. We took samples and went back to school and examined the plankton.

Results:
The average number of plankton we found was 20. We took samples of each location (Kihei Boat Ramp and Ho’okipa) and counted the number of plankton in each sample. We found 19 plankton in the Kihei boat ramp sample and found 21 plankton in the Ho’okipa sample.

Here are some pictures of the plankton that we saw:

This is a copepod that we found.

I don't really know what this is but it's a really cool plankton.

Here are two more copepods that we found.

Here is a graph of what we found: