Duckweed Research Paper

The Effect of Various Concentrations of Dawn Dish Soap on the Reproduction of Duckweed

Problem and Introduction: How does the amount of dawn dish soap affect the number of duckweed fronds? Detergents contain harmful ingredients that damage soil structures by raising alkalinity. Dawn contains chemicals such as methylisothiazolinone, which increases aquatic toxicity. Dawn also contains 1 4-dioxane which is considered a groundwater contaminant (gardenmyths.com). Detergents also create build-up in waterways and they cause eutrophication that creates lakes and streams to grow more blooms of algae (nature.com). These could harm the animals if ingested and by contaminated their water, plants by the alkalinity of the soil and the contaminated water, …show more content…
Next measure out 100ml of water (use a graduated cylinder to measure all liquids) and put it in jar A.
Then measure out 90 ml of water and 10ml of the dish soap to pour it in jar B.
In Jar C, using a graduated cylinder, pour in 99 ml of water and 1 ml of the dish soap.
After that, in Jar D use a pipette to drop in 2 drops of soap (which would equal 0.1ml) into 99.9ml of water.
Again, using the pipette, try and get only about a half a drop to get 0.01ml of soap into 99.99ml of water.
Then, use the tweezers to gently (do not close the tweezers, duckweed is fragile) get four two-frond duckweed plants for each jar, use duckweed with similar size and shape and that are green and healthy.
Make two tables, one for how many fronds you observe each day and one for the appearance of the duckweed each day.
Place the jar under light and take observations everyday for eight days and compare your results at the end. …show more content…
The amount of duckweed fronds at the end of the experiment were not significantly larger than the control therefore dawn dish soap did not affect the number of duckweed fronds. The average number of fronds in our experiment was 8.6 fronds, which is very similar to our control of 9 fronds. There was bleaching that occurred in the solution with 10% of dawn dish soap as the duckweed significantly changed color from green to white. In this experiment, not much growth occurred which could have been resulted by the low concentrations of the dawn dish soap or the amount of time we did the lab. To improve this experiment I would use higher concentrations of dawn dish soap, such as 50%, 40%, 30%, 20%, and the control of 0% and increase the days from 8 days to 15 days to get more accurate data. With this change I would still expect that my hypothesis of adding more dawn dish soap to duckweed would result in more fronds of duckweed. This is resulted by adding more dawn dish soap to increase the eutrophication which would result in more duckweed fronds. The results of this experiment teaches me that if detergent is added to pond water the amount of duckweed fronds will not significantly increase or decrease, but the color could change. So, in conclusion if only small concentrations of dish soap is added to a pond, it will not significantly harm

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