Our hypothesis was that the crayfish would show metabolic compensation when they are acclimated at different temperature. Our prediction for this experiment was that there would be no difference between oxygen consumption between cold acclimated crayfish and warm acclimated crayfish. Based on our t-test result, the p value was greater than 0.05(p=0.25). Therefore, it supported the prediction that there was no significant difference of the rate of oxygen consumption between warm and cold acclimated crayfish. The same thing was also supported by the Q10 value(Q10 = 1.05), which meant that crayfish showed a perfect compensation. This told us that crayfish was able to switch their physiological setting to keep their metabolism to an optimal point …show more content…
We measured metabolic rate indirectly from the rate the crayfish consumed oxygen, which was expressed in terms of body mass. Because we were using more than one crayfish, and all crayfish had a different body weight, expressing the oxygen consumption rate per unit mass made it more reasonable to compare different crayfish. As our resulted had shown that there is no significant difference in oxygen consumption between the warm and cold acclimated crayfish, and oxygen concentration should decrease when water temperature went up, crayfish must increase their ability to pick up oxygen from the environment when acclimated to higher temperature. This was supported by Powell and Watts 2006 that acclimation affected directly the ability of hemocyanin to bind oxygen. This told us that hemocyanin, analogous to hemoglobin in vertebrates, increased their ability to pick up oxygen when acclimated to a higher temperature. In addition, when crayfish were acclimated to 30°C, at least two unique acidic protein bands with isoelectric points (pI) ranging from approximately 4.6 to 4.8 were expressed (Powell and Watts 2006). Threrefore, the adding of acidic protein must have played an essential role in increasing the ability of hemocyanin to bind oxygen. Alteration in gene expression usually took days to happen, therefore crayfish that were acclimated to 20°C would be fine to acutely exposed to 10°C, because