Average Metabolic Rate Of Goldfish

Effect of Artificial Sweeteners on Average Metabolic Rate of Goldfish (Carassius Auratus)
Introduction
Artificial Sweeteners are sweeter than natural sugar, replace sugar if someone wants to eat less sugar and have been proven to be safe and even are a healthier option. But also as opposed to natural sugar, the energy that artificial sweeteners give a person is less. This is why it will be interesting to study the effect on metabolic rate of goldfish when in fish water that contains artificial sweetener. Metabolism is the different reactions that occur inside of an animal that help it function and stay alive. An experiment that desired to see effects of artificial sweeteners on metabolism in the long run found that, when tested on plants and
animals, there might have been changes to the organism's metabolism (Shearer and Swithers, 2016). It will interesting to see when goldfish are exposed to artificial sweetener if there average oxygen consumption rate, which will represent there mean metabolic rate, will change for the purpose of better understanding the relationship between sweeteners and the metabolism of the body. Goldfish will be the animal species used for this study since their metabolism can be changed easily, due to the fact that they are poikilothermic and we will use the ls23l metabolism goldfish database filled with data from UCLA ls23l undergraduates. The experimental hypothesis is that there will be a significant difference between goldfish’s mean metabolic rate in plain vs. artificially sweetened fish water. The null hypothesis is that there will not be a significant difference between goldfish’s mean metabolic rate in plain vs. artificially sweetened fish water.
Materials and Methods For this study, a chamber with a probe connected to a computer program called LoggerLite, Microsoft excel, artificial sweetener and the ls23l metabolism of goldfish database to give statistical results will be sufficient to obtain results that can be analyzed.
The control for this experiment will be the goldfish in plain fish water and the experiential trials will be goldfish in artificially sweetened fish water when obtaining oxygen concentration in the closed chamber. The artificial sweetener will be aspartame, which is very popular artificial sweetener. First obtain a cup of 200 ml of fish water and weigh the cup and then put two goldfish in the each cup and then find weights of the goldfish (in grams) as this can influence metabolism. Next warm up probe for 10 minutes and open up LoggerLite. The probe will read the concentration of oxygen in the chamber and send it to LoggerLite to get a reading of oxygen concentration every 20 seconds for ten minutes. Add 200 ml of fish water to the chamber and then add the cup of goldfish to chamber. Let fish get used to chamber and then click “collect” on the LoggerLite, which makes a table of time and oxygen concentration. While the test is running obtain 200 ml of fish water and dissolve 50 milligrams of Aspartame. When finished, copy the table into excel and make a scatter chart and find the slope of the trend line on the chart to get the rate of oxygen depletion in the chamber (mg/L*s). Next return goldfish to cup with 200ml fish water and clean chamber. This is the first control trial. Next repeat these steps for the experimental variable except instead pour 200ml of sweetened fish water into chamber and then add the same goldfish to the chamber. For the sampling size, the more trails there are the more accurate the results, so aim for at least 200-300 trials or more. After finding the slope, enter the slope from each trial along with the weights of the goldfish, into the metabolism goldfish database, which present the
average metabolic rate and standard deviation in the plain vs. sweetened fish water in mgO2 /(L*hr*kg). Finally the paired t-test value, p-value and number of trials done are given also.