For an experiment I'm studing the effect of water temperature on a goldfish’s respiration rate. What do I...

Question

need to research first before starting my experiment?

Answer 1

This sounds like a neat experiment!

You should have a good understanding of how temperature affects oxygen in the water. Warm water holds less oxygen than cold water.

I don't know how you are planning to measure respiration rate, but what ever you do, you might want to have a way to measure oxygen in the water (use a dissolved oxygen probe or dissolved oxygen kit--ask your teacher or professor to borrow one).

Don't do this experiment by taking the gold fish and moving it from one tank of one temperature to another. Gold fish freak out easily, and they'll look like they're respiring a lot, when they are just really nervous and scared. And drastically changing the temperature on them is just cruel. (when you buy fish from the pet store, they tell you to float the bag in the tank for 20 minutes before putting them in the tank to let them acclimate to the temperature, right?). Instead, have multiple tanks and compare the fishes that are acclimated to those temperatures. You should have multiple fishes in each tank to account for variances in fish.

Answer 2

Well... Like what you are trying to test for, you can do a research on the water temperature on goldfish's respiration rate. There is a possibility that somebody else done it before and you can do a similar experiment to test for reproducibility.

If there isn't anyone who has done it, you can research on factors that causes a change in goldfish's respiration rate such as salt concentration in water or the addition of other aquatic life in the aquarium.

Answer 3

This sounds exactly what a group did in my Biology 140 class at UBC.
- Know the realtionship between oxygen availabilty as water temperature increases
- Know how heat stress affects goldfish - google scholar it (b/c there may be more than one factor ;) )
- Just for good practice - know how to experimentally remove confounding factors - ie. how will you design your experiment so that only ONE (1) factor is tested?

That should be enough to get google scholar a lot of articles for research. Also check your library.

ps. if there's a group in your class doing Daphnia - tell them there's a whole book online about it.