Help on Biology! ( For all you SCIENTISTS!)

[Paar]

Ok so I have to Design and Test my own Expirement for Bio1 Which is

" How do Different Colored Wavelengths affect the amount of oxygen produced by the plant"

I have to show this is a project...

Heres my Ex. So far.

1. Put the banana plant in a soda bottle
2. Tie a balloon on top of the bottle
3. Put the bottles under different colored bulbs
4. Recored the amount by the different sizes of the balloons.

Anything Helps , Links , Advice, Etc

Help Please! If I get an A everyone who helped gets a little something in SL ;)

[Ihavenokills]

you lost me at wavelengths XD

[Paar]

Lol

[StompArtist]

i am weak about plants but i think that no fresh air is going to kill them...

...unless you find a way to get more co2 in there?

[mackjack]

I doubt there will be any change in air volume that you can measure with a balloon (co2 gets converted to o2, so not much -- if any -- change in volume). So you'll have to figure out a way to measure the o2 content of the air in the soda bottles either directly (not that easy) or indirectly.

By the way, your experiment is to take say 5 plants (A, B, C, D, E), put each of them under a light of different wavelength (A -> Light1, B -> Light2, C -> Light3, etc.), and after a few days, somehow measure the o2 contents of their soda bottles, right?

If this is the case, I think your experiment is flawed, because you are not taking into account that plants can have different metabolic rates, and since you are using a small number of plants, their variations can be big.

So if it were me, I would do this experiment of yours this way:

1. Get a bunch of alfalfa seeds, put them in water and wait for them to germinate
2. Put about the same amount of alfalfa sprounts in each tray
3. Put each tray under a light of different wavelength
4. After a few days, measure the average height/growth of the alfalfa sprouts in each tray

More growth = more co2 used up = more o2 produced. So measuring growth gives you an indirect measurement of o2 produced.

Since you are not measuring o2 contents directly, there is no need to use sealed bottles. Any open tray will work and is easier.

Did you science teacher think up the title of "How do Different Colored Wavelengths affect the amount of oxygen produced by the plant"? If so, that's a nice big red herring...

[TheChairmaker]

How we did this in school was to get a glass cup, and then half-fill it with water. We put some pondweed in and covered it with an upside-down test tube (IDK if you have/could get one?) full of water. That is a fiddly thing to get right, but if you can do it, this is one of the best methods. Also, each piece of pondweed has to be the same length so the test is fair. Yeah, then we put the whole kerboodle under a lamp. After a set length of time (an hour/day, whatever you want, just keep it the same each time) we measured the height of the air bubble in centimetres. That can be converted without altering the number into centimetres cubed of oxygen produced by the pondweed. Take the test tube off, rinse it out, fill it with water and put it back over the pondweed in the cup, and repeat using the same lamp (fair test) just with a coloured cling-film filter over it to alter the wavelength. Repeat for different wavelengths (colours) till you have a result!

Hope this helped some and you can use this method,
Zakalwe