Oxygen Consumption Lab Report

The goal of this study was to measure the oxygen consumption of goldfish in an ambient environment and dark environment and calculate if there was any difference in metabolism based on oxygen consumption. The experimental hypothesis was that the metabolic rate of the goldfish as measured by oxygen consumption differs in a dark environment than in an ambient environment. The null hypothesis was that the metabolic rate of the gold fish as measured by oxygen consumption does not differ in darkness versus ambient light. The results of this study signify that the null hypothesis is accepted. On average, a darker environment did lead to a lower metabolic late, with the dark conditions producing a mean oxygen consumption of -217 mgO2/ (L*hr*kg) and the ambient light conditions producing a mean oxygen consumption of -273 mgO2/ (L*hr*kg). The p-value of the experiment was 0.349 which is greater than the accepted value of .05, meaning that the differences were not statistically significant, rather random.
First, the sample size was small making it more difficult to have significant results. For our group specifically, the first time we ran the Logger Lite program, it stopped at a certain point due to the fact that we minimized the program, that increased the amount of the time that the fish were in the chamber. The procedure was not standardized, because the groups on the bench were calculating the behavior of the fish differently. As a group we decided to measure the behavior by the position of the goldfish in the four quadrants of the chamber, but when it came to measuring the behavior during the dark condition, the experimenter had to lift the cover for 5 seconds to be able to see the positioning of the fish which might have created some deviation in the reading. Therefore, in future studies I think it is important to standardize the way to measure the behavior to have more accurate