Daphnia Lab Report

839 Words2 Pages

Introduction
The purpose of this lab was to study the response of the genus Daphnia to chemical stimuli and to examine human responses to different stimuli. A stimulus is an incentive; it is the cause of a physical response. Stimuli can have a physical or chemical change; an example of a physical change is a change in temperature and sound. An example of chemical change would be changes in hormone levels and pH levels. Muscular activity or glandular secretions are responses that occurs when stimulus information effects the nervous and/or hormone system. Daphnia is a genus; it is a small crustacean that lives in fresh water. The body of the daphnia is visible and its internal organs are clearly seen thus it was chosen for this exercise. The …show more content…

It was placed on a slide, a couple drops of water was placed on the slide to keep it moisturized. Next, we used a microscope to observe the heart beating in the transparent animal. According to the lab report on page 98 the normal heartbeats are about 350 per minute. By using a pencil and paper, we made a small dash for every heartbeat over a 15 second interval. Than we continued to repeat the observation of the heartbeats 3 more times for a total of 4 observations. We than totaled up the number of dashes and calculated the average of the four 15 second observations, this was labeled “Normal Heart Rate” on Table 1. Next we added 1 drop of an “unknown” solution that was assigned, we made sure to determine the average normal heart rate before doing do. The same procedure outlined above was conducted. The records were than placed in table 1. We than used water in replace of the unknown solution. The same procedure was conducted, we analyzed whether the Daphnia had recovered or not. Lastly our records were compared among our …show more content…

The chemicals as well as temperature represent environmental change that affected the heartbeats. It was later revealed that Unknown #1 is Caffeine and Unknown #2 is Ethanol. A stimulant, like caffeine, is a drug that excites the central nervous system and increases alertness. The results for caffeine (Unknown #1) showed direct impact in trial #2, the number increase from 50 (trial #1) to 53 (trial #2). The results in the graph show a positive correlation between caffeine and the heart rate of Daphnia. Caffeine is the stimulus in this experiment because it inhibits the action of the enzyme, resulting in an increased intracellular concentration while ethanol works by inhibiting the action of the neurotransmitters that transmit nerve impulses across a

Open Document