Group 3 Merleen Emmanuel Coral Reef Bleaching Group 3 Merleen Emmanuel

What is Coral Bleaching? Coral reef is a very beautiful and diverse marine ecosystem. Unfortunately between 50% and 70% are under direct threat of coral bleaching. Coral bleaching is caused from the lost of zooxanthellae, the photosynthetic pigment inside coral reef. Eventually, the organism will die.

The Cause It is thought that many factors can cause coral bleaching. Some being the high temperatures or salinity of the water. Others include light intensity and ultraviolet radiation.

What can we do? As groups in Dr. DiResta’s lab, we can test out which of these factors is causing the most damage. From that information we can conclude what we can do to save the coral left in the world. Personally I want to test out how temperature or the light intensity of the water contributes to the bleaching. It depends on what my group decides and what they would like to test.

Measuring Zooxanthellae On our first day of class, we learned how to measure the zooxanthellae of the coral Xenia. We each took about 4 polyps, weighed them and homogenized them in 2ml of sea water. We put a couple of drops on 2 sides of the slide and put a cover on it.

The Calculations First we calculated the average number of zooxanthellae we counted. We divided that number by 4x10-6ml. We took that quotient and multiplied it by 2, the volume of water used. Finally we that product and divided it by the wet weight of the polyps we used. All of this gave us the Zoox density of 1.358x108 zoox/g wet weight. The average for all 4 groups was 214,592,500.

Finally!!! Using 1ml of homogenate and 9ml of acetone, we put them both in the same test tube and vortex and extract for 10min. We used 3 wavelengths (665, 647 and 630) and recorded the micrograms using the equation Ca=(11.85A665)-(1.54A647)-(0.08A630). We got 1.55145 micrograms per ml. And using V(Ca) to find the total L concentration of the chlorophyll. That was 1.939 micrograms per ml.

Lame Biology Joke A lonely frog, desperate for some form of company telephoned the Psychic Hotline to find out what his future holds. His Personal Psychic Advisor tells him, "You are going to meet a beautiful young girl who will want to know everything about you." The frog is thrilled and says, "This is great! Where will I meet her, at work, at a party?" "No" says the psychic, "in a Biology class."