Fertiliser Effect On Duckweed

• Duckweed (Lemna minor) is a member of the Lemnaceae family (Monette et al. 2006) it is a small plant that floats on the surface of still or stagnant water that is usually rich in nutrients (Keddy 2010). It was seen that Duckweed thrived in areas of high nutrient content, high sunlight and warmer temperatures (Taylor 2011) .It was also seen that fertilisers contained nutrients, such as nitrates, which greatly influences duckweed growth. Duckweed is also used for feed for farm animal, such as ducks, and it is also used to reduce nutrients in eutrophic environments (Ansari and Khan 2008, 2009, 2011); therefore this experiment was done to determine the effects that high concentrations of fertilisers cause on Duckweed by repeatedly adding varying
Container A which received only 0.6mℓ of fertiliser every two weeks grew rapidly which shows that the growth of the Duckweed plant will increase, even with a small amount of fertiliser and nutrients. This experiment also showed that too much fertiliser and nutrients can be lethal to the plant as in container E. This means that there is a very fine line between too much fertiliser and nutrients and just the right amount. This entire problem can be solved using phytoremediation. Duckweed is often used for this purpose in order to decrease nutrient content in water, this would therefore increase Duckweed plant growth but since it is used as feed for animals, it can be gathered and used for that purpose. In this way eutrophication levels are decreased in water sources and there is more food
Due to this, the high nutrient content in the fertiliser greatly influenced Duckweed growth and caused it to double its biomass in a very short period of time. The control experiment justified this by only growing a very small amount until there were no nutrients in the water to help the plant grow and it started to die and decrease in size. In order to improve the experiment, more experiment samples needed to be used so that the optimum amount of fertiliser and nutrient content that increased growth and was not toxic to the plant would have been