Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

i have a tentative research topic already. i need help in getting more information because the articles i have found are not specific. my topic is about the potential use of molmol fish scales as wastewater treatment. i need to find methods or procedures that are detailed so that i can perform my experiment the soonest. thank u for helping.

Raya

Hello Raya,

That is an intriguing topic you have picked as a project and one that is totally new to me. I looked up mol-mol and found that it is a native word for the parrotfish. Is that correct? I did not see any mention of using the scales for anything, however. If you could send a couple of the articles you have about this I might be able to help you with your experiments.

Best wishes,

SciB

gud day SciB,

here are the articles i have read about this. http://www.investigatoryprojectexample. ... nthin.html. yes sir/maam;it is indeed the parrotfish. hope u could give me information about the methods to be used. the article i have read is very limited and i am really interested in this topic.thank u for responding to my post. i really appreciate ur effort. More power!

Hi Raya,

I found a published article about using fish scales to remove astaxanthin from shrimp processing water and I have attached it for you to look at. It has the details about how the scales were treated before use and how the purification column was set up.

I think it’s really a cool idea to use fish scales that would just be thrown away as waste to purify the water used for seafood processing. Do you live anywhere near a fish processing plant? You mentioned parrotfish scales. I think I would try something a little less exotic, like tilapia. I suspect that not all scales have the same adsorptive properties. You need to be careful of your source of scales because they need to be fresh and free from any impurities or foreign chemicals. Call a fish-processing plant and tell them you are doing a science project on waste fish scales. I’m sure they would be happy to help you.

As to what to try purifying through your fish-scale column, you could soak some shrimp in water to extract the astaxanthin and test the recovery as they did in the paper. I’m curious as to what else the scales might be able to extract. A good project could be made testing fish-scale removal of heavy metals such as lead from waste water since these are very toxic in the environment. Maybe you can think of a whole list of things to test and find some surprises. That’s what makes doing experiments so much fun—something new and unusual always turns up that stimulates you to do more experiments and you may make a really important discovery that no one else has ever seen.

So, run with this project and let’s see what you can do. We’ll be here to help you with the details when you have questions.

All the best,

SciB

dear SciB,

thank u for helping me. i could never say how lucky i am to have someone like u to help me with these. thank u also for the suggestions. ok, i'd do what u suggest. actually i live somewhere by the sea. i dont know if there are fish processing plants in my vicinity but ill try to look for one. i chose parrotfish because someone has already studied the tilapia fish scales. ill try to look for something less exotic. thanks again for your help. ill update as soon as i can.

ill also refer your suggestions to my research partners and my mom since i need their approval also. i think ill go with ur suggestion about the extraction of heavy metals. what could be some other fish scales that i can use sir/maam.(should i call u sir or maam?) thanks again and more power

I'm a guy, Raya, but please don't call me sir. I'm not into formality, just happy to help.

I think you made a good choice of testing the scales for removing pollutants like metals from water. The difficulty with those kinds of experiments, however, is how do you measure the amount of metal in the water before and after the clean-up?

Think back to what the scientists in the paper did. They used the colored compound astaxanthin, so they could see that it was removed from the waste water. Are there any metal salts that give colored solutions? Yes--copper for one. So, you could get some copper sulfate, dissolve it in water to make a blue solution then let it seep through your column of ground up fish scales. If the scales adsorb the copper, they should appear bluish and the solution passing through should be less blue.There are instruments that can measure the absorption of light by colored solutions, or you could estimate the copper by eye after making a set of standards.

What are the heavy metals that you were thinking about testing? Lead is a common environmental pollutant, but its salts are not colored. There are other ways to measure its concentration, however.

Remember to check the Scibuddies Science Fair Project Guide https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... ndex.shtml because it tells you all the things you need to think about in setting up a hypothesis, choosing dependent and independent variables, applying statistics, graphing, etc. Planning is really, really important! You don't want to get part way through your project only to realize that you don't have something you need or forgot an important control. Judges want to see that you use appropriate positive and negative controls in your experiments, and have a large enough sample number that you can do statistics on.

Let me know if you have more questions when you get more into it and remember to make the project your own--if you have an idea that you want to try, post it to scibuddies, even if it seems crazy. You might be onto something nobody has thought of before.

Good luck!

Sybee

Greetings Mr. SciB,

thank u for everything. ill definitely check on the link that u gave me. this organization helps me a lot. ill also start thinking and planning my final experiment. thanks a lot. will update as soon as possible. i forgot to mention that the parrotfish is abundant in my country. we even eat it for supper that's why it was my first choice.