Phytoplankton Experiment Topics

[Qube]

I need to do an experiment involving phytoplankton, and I'm having trouble finding do-able topics: I'm not a researcher with access to very expensive equipment. I do, however, have access to whatever is at my school.

So far, I've come up with testing the effect of temperature on phytoplankton primary productivity, but the way I'm going to be measuring primary productivity is through the amount of dissolved oxygen in the water, but the amount of dissolved oxygen is similarly affected by the temperature! So that clearly isn't going to work :)!

I've also thought about doing light intensity on primary productivity, but we just did an experiment involving light intensity and primary productivity ... so that's probably not good.

And one more question to all the biology experts out there: how exactly does one go about putting equal amounts of phytoplankton inside containers? I know how to catch phytoplankton, but how do you put an equal amount of phytoplankton inside jars?

 

[chemisttree]

I need to do an experiment involving phytoplankton, and I'm having trouble finding do-able topics: I'm not a researcher with access to very expensive equipment. I do, however, have access to whatever is at my school.

So far, I've come up with testing the effect of temperature on phytoplankton primary productivity, but the way I'm going to be measuring primary productivity is through the amount of dissolved oxygen in the water, but the amount of dissolved oxygen is similarly affected by the temperature! So that clearly isn't going to work :)!

Gee, if only we had a control at the same temperature to compare...

And one more question to all the biology experts out there: how exactly does one go about putting equal amounts of phytoplankton inside containers? I know how to catch phytoplankton, but how do you put an equal amount of phytoplankton inside jars?

How small are these little buggers? Can you pipette a stirred solution of them without squishing 'em?