The data displayed a small degree of lateral motion between ~0.4L and ~0.8L in mako sharks, and a substantial gain in its amplitude after ~0.8L. Regarding the sonomicrometry results, red and white muscle have a synchronous motion during passive swimming. Meanwhile, in active swimming read and white muscle action were not synchronous.
Tunas and lamnid sharks are characterized by their morphological similarities and their ability to sustain intensive exercise over prolonged periods of time. Such feats are capable thanks to the aerobic or red musculature, which relies on oxygen and provides endurance. It is known that tuna physically uncouple their red muscle and project it towards posterior regions of the body to produce their thunniform-like swimming. Nonetheless, tunas and lamnid sharks are distantly related and acquired their thunniform body shapes and aerobic capabilities independently, making them a case of convergent evolution.
The locomotor system of tunas has been recently investigated, but prior to this study there was a gap in the knowledge regarding that of lamnid sharks. The objective of this study was to learn more about the dynamic properties of the locomotor system of lamnid sharks. Due to sharing morphological and locomotive similarities with tuna, the researchers hypothesized that the force-transmission system of tunas is also found in lamnid sharks.
Proteins help with basically every function our body carries out. Our body is essentially made of cells and proteins. Proteins help build and repair tissue, make enzymes and hormones, as well as interact with one another to carry out even more complex cell processes. Additionally, a high Kd value indicates a low affinity. It's kind of like how a low pH value means a higher concentration of H+ ions. It's inversely proportional. A lot of factors can influence protein interaction. In class, I remember talking about several factors. We mentioned how heat, light, pH, detergent, etc can influence the non covalent bonds in proteins. I am wondering if there are any things that can influence the interaction of covalent bonds.
There are two ways that the pressure of the heart can be affected immediately. The first is by reducing the volume of the container without reducing the volume of the liquid. This causes a pressure buildup in the hearts chambers. Another is to increase the volume of the liquid without increasing the volume of the container. This also causes a pressure buildup.
After allowing four days to elapse, all the data pertaining to the post-experiment web mass was collected. Values were compared to the original data collected for web mass. We observed that the condition with the lowest amount of web mass at the conclusion of the experiment was the cold condition. Furthermore, the warm and control conditions did not vary significantly in terms of the amount of web mass. The observation of the cold condition resulting in the lowest amount of web production had some confounding variables. Mainly, one of the spiders escaped its enclosure on the third day of the experiment. This would certainly lead to less web production since the spider was not present to produce web on the final day of the experiment. In addition, the ice replacement was relatively inconsistent due to time constraints. However, the other three spiders completed the entire experiment and the effect was still observed among those three.
The ice replacement was not as consistent throughout the experiment as we would have liked, and we believe this could have had an effect on the results. Due to the fluctuations in ice replacement and amount of ice added, the consistency of the temperature in the chambers was partially sacrificed. We were able to obtain a temperature reading from three of the four days of the experiment and consequently have an average temperature for the condition. But due to the methods of temperature reading acquisition and instrument used, we do not consider the values to be absolute. This takes away from the result of our experiment and for any future experiments of similar vein. To correct it, we would need to ensure a more consistent ice refresh schedule and implementation of better instruments to constantly observes the temperature as compared to periodically.
Other alterations to the design of the experiment that would be beneficial to the results include a more streamlined environment chamber design and a more consistent ice refreshing procedure. In particular, the cold condition chamber presented some challenges over the course of the experiment that were likely the reason one of the spiders escaped. Because ice was melting within the chamber at any given time, moisture was also accumulating within the environmental chamber. Although this was occuring at a slower rate compared to normal conditions due to the insulatory properties of the styrofoam box, it was still occuring. This in conjunction with ice being added periodically to the chamber lead to the deformation of the divider platform suspending the enclosures within the chamber. We believe that this created an opening and allowed one of the spiders to escape from its respective enclosure. To compensate for this, changes to the design and material for the cold condition environmental chamber would have to be made.
In order for the results of this experiment to be more meaningful, a number of changes to the experiment itself would need to be reevaluated. For example, more spiders involved in the experiment would add much needed numerical significance to the data collected. Using only twelve spider across two groups was simply not enough. Also, the species of spiders was not homogenous and that definitely had an effect on the results; although all of the spiders looked similar enough and came from roughly the same environments (residential basements), their specific web making tendencies could have differed dramatically. Thus, the necessity of using the same type of spider and a larger sample are highlighted.
The findings stated above could be attributed to a number of different explanations and we will now discuss a subset of them. For the observation that the warm condition and the control condition resulted in a similar amount of web production, the increase in temperature did not seem affect the spider's ability to construct webs. Perhaps the temperature we raised the enclosures to (28.2 degree celsius) were not enough to make a meaningful impact on the amount of web produced. Another possibility is that the increase in heat actually affect the spider’s ability to produce normal web; maybe they did make a larger web but the heat caused it to comprised of thinner strands.
The data we collected partially partially coincided with our original hypothesis. We assumed that the warm condition would have a greater mass compared to the control after the experiment was completed. In addition, we believed that the cold condition would have the lowest web mass of the three conditions. We observed that there was not much of a difference between the warm and condition and the control condition in terms of web production. That being said, the cold condition did show the lowest web mass at the end of the experiment. However, we believe these findings to be incidentally biased due to the circumstances and occurrences during the course of the experiment.
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