Wednesday, December 7, 2011

Hands-On Biology!

As part of our biology curriculum, HoneyFern has adopted Olley Creek in Cobb County, Georgia. We are responsible for chemical monitoring (dissolved oxygen, pH, temperature and conductivity), and we will be trained in biological and frog monitoring in the spring. We test once a month, and one of the students will blog our experience, usually with pictures (but not in this case). Today's blogger is Sicily, a 6th grade student.

Today was the second day that we went to Olley Creek for Adopt-A-Stream!

It was raining; not pouring, not sprinkling. The kind of rain that slowly makes you uncomfortably wet. We chose to do lab testing even though it was raining because we went there earlier in the day to see if we should test the water, and the only thing we saw was that the water level had risen, but other than that, there were no mud or muddy parts, and everything seemed as if it was not raining (and when we got to the creek, it was merely sprinkling).

We did not have enough time to do two tests of each lab, but most of our data was almost exactly the same
(dissolved oxygen would be the main thing affected by a downpour, and our levels were nearly the same as last month). No errors occurred during our experiment, and I feel like we achieved our goal about the data we collected because it was almost exactly like the first set of data from November and it went smoothly.

It was our first time not being assisted by a professional. (Next month we plan to pick a sunny day and take more time in our data-gathering. We also need to bring trashbags to clean up what parts of the creek we can. We may also want to sponsor a trashcan at the park because there are no trashcans for some of the soccer fields, so people just throw their trash wherever).

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