Brine Shrimp Lab

Class Day 13

     On Tuesday, October 1st, we started a three day lab. This lab continued into office hours of the next day, and ended during our class on Thursday, October 3rd. Our goal was to find the affect of the concentration of salt in the water on the lives of Brine Shrimp. My prediction is that the Brine Shrimp need at least some salt to survive, for they are found in the ocean. However, I also predict that if the salt concentration is too high, the Brine Shrimp will die. What we must do is set up five different concentrations of salt in water, and recorded how many Brine Shrimp survive, and how many die or fail to hatch. I guess the water with either 1% or 1.5% salt will contain the highest percent of surviving Brine Shrimp.

     We tried to get about 20 eggs into each dish of water, but some of the dishes ended up with twice this amount. But since we recorded how many there were in each one, we should be fine.

Close Up Of Brine Shrimp Eggs

     When we showed back up on Wednesday during office hours, a few of the eggs had already hatched. At this time, the most amount of hatched eggs was found in the 0.5% salt concentrated water. This may suggest that Brine Shrimp live in bodies of water with salt concentrations similar to this.

Hatched Eggs

    The fact that there existed hatched eggs in different bodies of water prove that there were mutations that occurred that allowed some Brine Shrimp to live in higher salt-concentrated water, and some to live in lower salt-concentrated water.

At this point, our data also showed that no Brine Shrimp were able to survive in pure water.