rdigregorio's blog

The experiment that we did this week was too find the India ink consumption rate of tetrahymena over certain time periods. The way we did was to add Glutaraldehyde to the tetrahymena to stop them from moving. Then we added India ink to the tetrahymena and let them sit for certain intervals of time. After the period was up we looked at the tetrahymena under the microscope, and counted the number of vacuoles in each cell containing ink. We counted ten different cells for each time. After finding all this we found the mean and the standard deviation for all the different time periods. We found the standard deviation by finding the mean of all the vacuoles at each time

This creates a false image of which people will try to attain. People will try to look like this because it is shown as attractive, and everyone wants to be thought of as attractive. The result of people even attempting to look like this will create nothing but disappointment because of how unobtainable it really is. People normally have many things that occupy their time, such as jobs, school, family and other important responsibilities. This means that there really is not time in the day to try and work out and plan out diets as to look like this. 

The reason behavioral ecology interests me greatly is because there are so many different things that factor into it, and the wide range of things you can study. From environmental factors, to learned behaviors, the genetic variances, there are so many things that can determine why a certain organism lives and behaves the way it does. It would be interesting to see what the driving force behind certain behaviors are, and why it is better for the organism to live the way it does. Finding out if a certain way of doing something is better evolutionarily as a whole could tell you so much about an organism and the evolutionary pattern of that organism and its ancestors. The only way to study this would be by testing the success rate of different organisms in similar environments that act differently in similar situations. The behavior of organisms is, to me, that most interesting and variable part about ecology.

The reason behavioral ecology interests me the most because there are so many different things that factor into it, and the wide range of things you can study. From environmental factors, to learned behaviors, the genetic variances, there are so many things that can determine why a certain organism lives and behaves the way it does. It would be interesting for me to see what the driving force behind certain behaviors are, and why it is better for the organism to live the way it does. It would be interesting to find out if certain ways of doing things are better evolutionarily as a whole. The only way to tell this would be by studying the success rate of different organisms in similar environments that act differently in the same situation. The behavior of organisms is, to me, that most interesting and variable part about ecology.

Our findings show that as concentrations increase that does not mean that growth will increase. (Table 3) Also, it does not seem to correlate to how many flies are in the adult stage. (Graph 1) The life stages of the offspring do not seem to be accelerated by the growth hormone. This can be easily seen in graph 2 and 3. Graph 3 shows that only the one with the most hormone had larvae which doesn’t make sense with our hypothesis. Also, Table two shows that more pupae were in the tubes at the higher concentration levels. Inn graph 5 it shows that pupae made up a large amount of each fly grouping. It does seem however that reproduction rate increases when our group added 10 uM. This can be seen in table 1, there are much more flies overall than any of the other concentrations. Overall, more males than females were produced. (Graph 4)

My opinion on the matter is that there is nothing the human race can do to permanently win this theoretical arms race. The precautions that we already take is really the best that we can possibly do. If there was a way for us to cut out all diseases and have a clean world then we would have done it already. Unfortunately, whatever we do the disease will evolve to be immune to that certain treatment. With the numerous amount of ways diseases can spread to different hosts and with us not fully understanding the process of their evolution we have a tall hill to climb when it comes to eradicating diseases. Even in a place that we would think would be the cleanest such as hospitals diseases are still found and can easily spread. (“Hospitals installed more sinks to stop infections. The sinks can make the problem worse”) These are facilities that are cleaned every day and we still cannot control the pathogens there. Unfortunately, it looks like this is a war that will wage on forever.

The study of human eugenics is a field that can change the human race for good. It seems that the studies being done can make the human race be able to have less disease and live for a longer period of time. Scientists in the “pros and cons of genetic engineering in humans” article have said that we are in some ways playing god. This is a valid claim because we are essentially trying to keep certain traits and get rid of others. Years ago, we did not have the technology to do this and weren’t even thinking about it. Some may say that natural selection is being cheated in this situation. In the coming years you may be able to give your child the ideal features you want him to have, or the ability to be immune to certain diseases. (You're only human, but your kids could be so much more) Would I want my child to have the best features possible? Of course. This would go as a steep price though because everyone else wants the same thing. Being able to design every human how you wanted them may lead to even more competition than before. Would this be a good thing for the human race as a whole? Or would this slowly lead to our demise?

In this experiment, we worked with tetrahymena thermophila. Tetrahymena are unicellular ciliates that feed on bacteria. They can reproduce sexually and asexually. They use cilia to sweep their food into the cells oral groove. (Bozzone, 1998, p. 347) For our experiment our decided to see what different volumes of serotonin would do to the feeding habits of the tetrahymena. The hypothesis we came up with for the experiment is: If we add increasing volumes of serotonin to samples of tetrahymena, then the rate of consumption of the tetrahymena will increase. We decided that this hypothesis was justified because the serotonin increases phagocytosis. (Quinones-Maldonado and Renaud, 1987, p. 435) Phagocytosis is the taking up bacteria or other materials. We believe this means that the consumption of the tetrahymena with more serotonin will have a higher consumption rate. 

Within the plastic container is a small organism that seems to move by muscle contractions. The muscle contractions move along the body laterally allowing it to inch around the container. The organism stays on the perimeter of the container and when put in the middle it inches back out to the edge. It is a tan color and seems to have a translucent outer layer if tissue. There are rings on the organism that go around the entire circumference of the body. They seem to be evenly spread out, and they form ridges because they protrude from the skin. Also there is something inside the body that goes from the tip of the head all the way to the tail. It looks as though it may be a neural cord of some kind or it could be a digestive tract. On the front of the body there is a black section at the very tip which may be the sensory system of the organism. There are two brown spots on the back of organism. From these observations lead me to believe it is a larvae of some kind.

     Within the small plastic container is a small organism that seems to move by muscle contractions. The muscle contractions move along the body laterally allowing it to inch across the container. The organism stays on the perimeter of the container and when put in the middle it inches back out to the edge. The organism is a tan color and seems to be mostly see through. There are rings on the body that go around the entire circumference of the body. They seem to be evenly spread out. Also there is something that goes from the tip of the body all the way to the tail. It looks as though it may be a neural cord of some kind or it could be a digestive track. On the front of the body there is a black section at the very tip which may be the sensory system of the organism. There are two brown spots on the back of organism.