LD-50 Lab For Blackworms

Time (min) Treat Ment Initial Observ. some look dead. Barley moving Barley moving Wingling kind of clumped together Wiggilin g. Spread out 5 10 15 2 for sure alive some are not active most active Continu e to be clumped up More clumpin g 20 30 Final

0%

some look dead Not much moveme nt Moving a lot

1 alive 2 look dead

one is not active

9 alive

1 = 10%

0.01%

2 alive for sure Clumpe d in the middle Now starting to clump Moving now clumpin g a little

Most look alive Some moving around Active All

All alive

0 = 0%

0.1%

All active 0 = 0%

1%

Still wiggling

All alive

0 = 0%

10%

Wiggling Spread not out all happy over

Some Some are look clumped dead

4 have died

4 = 40%

Graph:

Initial Questions: 1. At what does will the worms react to the copper.? 2. How fast will the worms begin to die?

Follow-up questions: 1. Review your initial questions before starting the lab. Did you answer these after finishing the lab? Explain. My initial questions was 1. At what dose will the worms react to the copper and 2. How fast will the worms begin to die. Both questions were answered in the lab. The answer to both was at the concentration of 10%. At 10% they were more active but moving in the way that they were unhappy. And there were the most death at 10% as well, 4 deaths to be exact. 2.Look at the graph you made above of the % of blackworms that died at each concentration of copper sulfate. What is the LD-50 that you would calculate from this data? To begin with our data is one I would not follow if this was a real experiment, it doesn't look very stable or seem to make sense, but if I were to calculate the LD-50 from this graph it would be in between 1 and 10%. 3.How would your answer change if you were trying to determine the ED-50 (effective dose, or dose where 50% of the blackworms changed behavior)? Hint: Think about what concentration of copper made about half of the blackworms stop moving unless poked, etc...Is this value less than the LD-50? Why? I would say that at the concentration of 0.01% because according to my chart where i stated the behavior in this concentration the black worms were barley moving and as it got closer to the end of the 30 minutes they were all active. So would call this the effective dose. 4. If you were the policy-maker in charge of determining the highest level of copper that should be allowed in San Diego Bay, what concentration would you choose? Why? If I had to pick a concentration I would pick 0.01 even though on my graph it shows the concentration continues at 0% from 0.01 - 1%. I picked a lower number because it is best to not push it, copper is very harmful to organisms so if we must have some amount let it be a small amount. Or better none at all, but that isn't very realistic as much as I would like to think it is. Conclusion/ Footnote In conclusion I believe our data is flawed. The outcomes we came up with didn't seem to fit what was suppose to happen. I originally thought that the higher the concentration level the more worms would die, but between 0.01 -1% the death stayed at 0 which old and then at 10% it went up. Our data is very interesting and makes we wonder what the cause for this was. What I concluded that 1. We either didn't do it right the transition of copper from one little plate to another and 2. Maybe these are valid results and the worms in certain concentrations simply reacted differently or didn't mind the copper. Overall this experiment would be good to do over again to make sure there are valid results.