Experiment 1 Compare And Contrast The Final Concentration Of Dunaliella

Ecology 1-Page Report

Introduction

Ecosystems, ones containing a producer, consumer, and sometimes a predator, can impact the stability of a system. Each organism in the ecosystem plays a key role in interacting with others and maintaining or changing the overall food web. The food web is designed to evolve in a chain reaction progression where the producer produces food for the consumer and the consumer is essentially consumed by the predator if one is present, creating ecosystem stability. Dunaliella is a primary producer in sodium chloride and water environments and is the backbone to the ecosystem created for experiment. Artemia, a small, transparent in color, shrimp, is a consumer of algae and preys on primary producers in the system while hiding from Aiptasia, a dark brown, shelled

Experiment 1 was an ecosystem that lacked the presence of a predator whereas experiment 2 had a predator present. We found that experiment 1 displays a positive linear relationship (0.171, adjusted R-squared), but visually has a negative slope in terms of β (-992.1)(see Figure 1), whereas experiment 2 does not return a positive linear relationship (-0.01437, adjusted R-squared), and visually also has a negative slope in terms of β (-964.4)(see Figure 2). Our beta estimates are comparable for the two regressions, but the linear regression for experiment 2 shows a more horizontal line, closer to a slope of zero. Experiment 1 shows a higher mean between our two variables (11.52, F-statistic on 1 and 50 DF), but returns a high probability of a correlation between the Final Concentration of Dunaliella and Number of Artemia (0.001354, p < 0.05) in comparison to experiment two where the data is more closely dispersed from the mean (0.3623 F-statistic on 1 and 44 DF) and lower probability of a correlation between the Final Concentration of Dunaliella and Number of Artemia (0.5503, p >