Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

hey my name is emily & i am going to experiment if the price of a water bottle (expensive or cheap) determines the quality of the water.
so far, i am testing my experiment on goldfish.
i am going to have 5 different kind of water brands,
from evian to a 99 cents brand.
i am going to pour about 5 goldfish in each water bottle (at first) and wait for about 2 days to notice the difference between each brand.

when i get my results from that, i am going to place new goldfish in a fish bowl filled with the water from the water bottle and see if the plastic from the water bottle has anything to do with it being unhealthy.

any ways i could improve/do on my project?
how can i test the water? how can i get my results?

Hi Emily,

Doing a water quality project is an excellent idea, however, if you use a vertebrate animal like goldfish, you will need to get permission in advance from the scientific review committee.

https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... _src.shtml

If possible, I recommend that you use Daphnia instead of goldfish.

https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... p043.shtml

Working with goldfish or Daphnia, you would be looking for anything in the bottled water that was acutely toxic.

Here are some other water quality projects from the Science Buddies website. Since you have a short amount of time, you might consider the conductance test, as this

https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... p011.shtml

https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... p024.shtml

https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... p030.shtml

https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... I&from=TSW


What are you going to use for a control in your experiment? Do you have any other questions?


Donna Hardy

I am still unsure of what my control expiriment is going to be.

I am going to talk to my Biology teacher tomorrow about it and see my expirment group and control group and what I can do to make it so that I can have very accurate results.

Thanks for the help, it helped a lot and made my project more testable!

Hi,

It's good that you are going to discuss this with your teacher.

Here is information on the science buddies website about designing your experiment including controls. For a water project, you should include controls that would not show any toxicity and controls that would be acutely toxic. Results of actual samples would be expected to fall between the negative and positive controls and would give you a point of reference. If you do the conductance experiment, you would use pure deionized water and a salt solution with a known concentration of salt for control samples.
https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... dure.shtml

Donna Hardy