Help wanted.. Need advice for a project

[philly]

Hello,
I am doing a Science Fair for high school. Like many of you here on this board, I love fish and marine life. I would really like to base my project on my favourite hobbie, however, I have run into a little problem. I would like to show how global warming will affect marine life. I was planning on testing this by changing different factors in the aquarium such as temperature salinity. In order to see how this affects marine life, I would have used invertabrates (snails, shrimp, crabs) to find out in the future which invertabrates are more suseptible to these rapid changes. The only problem with this is that the rules regarding the science fair are very strict on harming living things. Are there any ways of seeing if these invertabrates will die before actually dying? If so, can someone please inform me on this. If not, does anyone have any ideas for a different project (remember this is grade 9 science fair, although im up for a challenge) concerning aquariums.

thanks,
phil.

 

[Sam]

IMHO if you want to really write about the impact of global warming on marine life, there is tons of information available on the web and your local library. I definitely cannot lend any support to any project by anyone that will intentionally involve hurting animal life, not when there is so much information and research findings already there. Plus, remember you cannot simulate global warming in a few minutes when this is a long term phenomenon. If you want to do an aquarium project, what about:

A description of the maturation cycle of a SW tank (Demonstrate the testing of and you can illustrate varios phases of Ammonia, Nitrite and Nitrate). Talk about the bacteria, the chemistry etc

Maintaining healthy fish in an aquarium: talk about the things that need to be considered - water, salt, food, LR, waste and handling it, filtration, lighting, salinity etc.

HTH 8)

 

[BillyZ]

one possibility, don't focus on macro life, focus on microlife. Thats the base of the food chain and anything that impacts that will impact exponentialy the larger life forms. Set up a tank with lots of algeas, sponges, etc and conduct your experiment on that system. this way you get teh observations and "science" you need without harming any "Creatures".