salinity

I chose to experiment with the effects of salinity changes on the polychaete, Nereis succinea. Along with the other members of the group, Patty and Jeremy, I was curious to see whether the worms would engage in adaptive behavior when placed in a tank of water of foreign salinity, or whether they would simply continue changing osmotically until they reached equilibrium with the environment. The first step in our experiment was to simply observe the …

…this project, and I truly, honestly did learn a lot from it (and I’m not just saying that). If I were to do it again, I would not have made the change in salinity so great. It would have been interesting to see what would have taken place if the change in salinity were only, say, six parts per thousand higher and six parts per thousand lower. Maybe next time we’ll do that.