Environmental Science Assignment Help

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Assignment: Lab Report

Title: Identifying Environmental Hazards

Instructions: You will write a 1-page lab report using the scientific method to answer the following questions:

When your lab report is complete, post it in Submitted Assignment files.

Part I: Using the lab animation, fill in the data table below to help you generate your hypothesis, outcomes, and analysis.

Part II: Write a 1-page lab report using the following scientific method sections:

Provide references in APA format. This includes a reference list and in-text citations for references used in the Introduction section.

Give your paper a title and number, and identify each section as specified above. Although the hypothesis will be a 1-sentence answer, the other sections will need to be paragraphs to adequately explain your experiment.

Part 1:

How Did They Get Here?

Prior to a transatlantic journey, unladen cargo ships leaving port must first transfer millions of gallons of local water into their ships to act as a ballast as they travel along the ocean. Within their ballast can be thousands of organisms that are indigenous to the area where the ship’s ballasts were filled. Once these ships make their way to their destination, they dump their ballast water so that they can pick up their cargo for the return journey. It is this repeated and unregulated process of cargo ships traveling from Europe to inland North America—which has been going on since the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway in 1959—that is believed to have led to the first observation of the buildup of zebra and quagga mussels in the Great Lakes in the 1980s.

Conditions

Zebra and quagga mussels are built to avoid environmental resistance and have the greatest biotic potential in the Great Lakes. The abiotic conditions in the Great Lakes are optimal for the mussels for the following reasons:

• The environment provides hard rocky substratum for their attachment
• There are ideal summer water temperatures, pH levels, and calcium concentrations.
• Further ideas for their success in North America are based upon the lack of effective predators and pathogens to regulate their numbers.

Why Do They Stay?

Zebra and quagga mussels exploit a niche on exposed wet-hard substratum in the wave-swept shore conditions of freshwater lakes and rivers. This is a habitat that was not exploited by organisms, but it is currently under post-zebra and quagga mussel invasion, which is further contributing to their ease of expansion.

Part 2 : Timeline

Background

1. Zebra and quagga mussels have the ability to filter a photosynthetic group of organisms known as phytoplankton from the water.
2. Their individual filtration rates can be up to 12.4 liters per day.
3. Their numbers have been noted to be as high as 750,000 individuals per square meter on manmade structures.
4. Their invasion can be linked to effectively removing a very large percentage of the phytoplankton from the water. Phytoplankton are a keystone group of primary producers that form the base of the food web within many freshwater ecosystems.
5. As phytoplankton are removed, their primary consumers, the zooplankton, become reduced.
6. As the zooplankton become reduced, this is followed by foraging fish and predators that feed on those fish.
7. Algae (plant life) known as Cladophora has shown a correlation with the success of zebra and quagga mussels. Nutrients, such as nitrogen and phosphorus, have been found to increase in the presence of zebra and quagga mussels. CO2 production is increased because of their respiration. All of these components are important in sustaining plants and algae. As the Cladophora builds up along the coast, it will collect bird droppings that harbor E. coli bacteria, leading to fecal contamination of the surrounding water.