Visual Obituary of the fish

Conclusion: Interactions of Abiotic Factors

The aboitic factors that were within our three leveled eco column were:

• The dcomosing material within the decomp chamber.
• The rocks within the fish habitat.
• The soil within both the decomp and top soil chambers.

These abiotic factors within the eco column are essential to the flow of nutrients, therefore they would affect the data. Several trends were noticed in the data:

• As the decomp chamber decomposed, the pH of the water also rose. This could be attributed to dead flies that could decompose and fall into the fish chamber.
• Turbidity would be affected by the bits that fall down through the holes in the bottom of the decomp chamber, Turbidity did go from 0 to 41.3 in just 7 days.

Conclusion- comparioson to...

We compared ours to Sarah Metz's. Ours, I think overall did better. At first they had no grass growing because they made mud instead of soil and the grass only grew like 1 or 2 blades after a couple days ours grew much more. And our fish lived longer. I think some of the contributing factors would be the fish itself. Ours was much larger and seemed healthier than theirs when first transferred. also there is tank size and feeding, we definitely feed ours more. As for the grass when they first got the soil they way over watered it so it took the grass a week to grow. although for ours it was the opposite at times we found our soil very dry but it regardless grew more than theirs. as for the decomp. chamber I think ours did better because we had many fruit flies but also a flourishing spider that kept decomposition going by killing flies.

What we would do different if we had the chance to do it again.

If we could redo our eco-collum then we would make each section a little bit taller. Then we would have improved our decomp chamber by putting in some decomposting fruit along with one or two more spiders. Then we would put a cover over our grass chamber so water that evaperates get trapped and drop back down as water. A green house, per say. Then the last thing we would do, would be to increase the holes that the water uses to flow in between each chamber.

What is the most important thing we learned from this experiement

That we can not sustain life in an eco-column. But being serious, we learned that with the right quantitys and qualitys, life is possible to sustain in a self preserving eco-column. Along with a little added food here and there. We also learned how an ecosystem works at a much smaller scale.

problems/ errors, unexpected observations, and modifications

Now while doing this experiment we found that we never had problems or errors with our data and with conducting the tests. Now we did find a very peculiar, clear, substance floating on the entire surface of our aquerium chamber. We did not modify anything throughout our experiment.

Watering Patterns