Materials Needed
- Plastic bottle (and bottom half of another)
- Spring water
- Gravel
- Potting soil
- String
- Elodea plant
- Snails
- Daphnia
- Seeds (corn, green bean, spinach, broccoli)
- Shrimps
We started by adding a small cup (Dixie cup) of gravel into the bottom half of a plastic bottle. In the same bottle, we added 750mL of spring water, 3 shrimps, 3 medium size snails, 7 daphnia, and a 21cm long elodea plant. After finishing with this bottom half (aquatic part) we then started working on the bottom top half of the bottle - the terrestrial part. The cap needs to have a small hole in the middle where we passed a short string (doubled), which it will connect the terrestrial part to the aquatic part together.
After this we closed the bottle and started filling up the top half of bottle with soil. We then added 6 seeds (3 broccoli seeds, 1 corn, 1 spinach and 1 green bean) and moistened the soil. We put the terrestrial top half of the bottle on top of the aquatic section. We carefully taped those two sections together. To the top part (terrestrial section) we tapped the other half of the bottom bottle to “close it.”
All of our living creatures seemed to be doing well in their new “home.” We noticed that we moistened the soil more than needed because after we taped everything together, there was water dripping on the aquatic section. Also, the elodia was too long that impeded the string to go straight down. Instead, it was just floating on top of the water; we believe this can slow down the process of transporting water to the top side of the system.
It was important to read the procedures before we actually started following them. This helped us because we knew the overall picture of what we were supposed to do for the experiment. After looking at the procedures, we started doing the experiment by sections, for this particular experiment - terrestrial and aquatic sections. When we would finish each section, we then looked back to the steps to make sure that we had completed and followed every step. We made sure that we would write down the quantities next to the materials we had used. It was important to write any data before we would forget.
We learned about the different functions/ roles of the different living materials that we used. We also learned what daphnia and elodea were, and their purpose in the ecosystem, such as providing oxygen and clearing the water. As we followed the procedures, we used predictions and previous knowledge to come up with a reasonable goal for our project.