Kaleb Thom

6 December 2014
William Hamilton
Tuesday Section
American River Ecology Lab
Introduction:
The American River is a California watercourse river system which runs from the crest of
the Sierra Nevada mountain range to its confluence with the Sacramento River then emptying
itself from the San Francisco bay to the Pacific Ocean. The American River creates an important
place within northern California for its water source by providing power from dams and
irrigation to the farmers (McMaster 2008). Due to California being large agricultural state many
times the river often times becomes contaminated from famers due to irrigation and become
contaminated with fertilizers and chemicals. However, because of this the river quality becomes
affect, so in this experiment we are going to look at how fertilizers and chemicals from farmers
affect the water quality (Zou et al. 2005). In this experiment we added the house plant fertilizer,
African Violet to a treatment jar of water see how the quality of the water is after 3 weeks. From
this I came up with the hypothesis that the water with fertilizer added will be affect absorbance
and color change.
Methods:
I obtain two clean jars to put. The control jar is labeled A and the treatment jar is labeled
B then after labeling the jars, we filled the jar with 200mL of river water obtained from the
American River, marked the level of water by sharpies to measure evaporation. After that, we
added three drops of African Violet Fertilizer into the treatment jar, then set both jar into the
appropriate place, under UV lights to imitate sunlight from the American river. The African
Violet Fertilizer contained 8% of Nitrogen, 14% of Phosphate, 9% of Potassium, 1% of Iron,
0.05% of Manganese, and 0.05% of Zinc. During the waiting period of 3 weeks for the fertilizer
to take full effect of the water we fill the water up to the line, as the water evaporate. Then after 3
weeks we took the controlled and treatment jar to the spectrophotometer to determine the
transmission of the water as a wavelength. Then we input the data in Excel so find the T-test and the Pvalue.

Absorpti
on

Results:

Figure 1shows there is a significant different in the

number algae growth in the experimental jar than in the
control jar.

From the T-test we found that there was a significant difference of the color change and the
number of algae growth between the control and treatment jar. P-value is (1.06 x 10-5). The
average number of algae in the treatment jar is 0.22 0.18. For the control jar, the average
number of algae growth is 0.03 0.01, (Figure 1).
Discussion:
The result shown from the experiment supported the hypothesis that there will be more
algae in the treatment jar than in the control jar. Algae grow when they have the right conditions
such as adequate nutrients (mostly phosphorus but nitrogen is important too), light levels, pH,
temperature, etc. (Zou et al. 2005). African Violent is a fertilizer and gives nutrient to plants.
However with the conditions enacted by the light and temperature algae formed which caused
the treatments jar to be greener. With this the experiment supported my hypothesis that the
treatment jar would be greener with algae forming. Some experimental error that could be found
within the experiments could be the amount of fertilizer put was suppose to be 3 drops but I
accidently put 4 drops. This could caused an increase in the amount of algae. Also, when I
retrieved the sample from my jar I could've gotten a bad sample as one of my group mates had
the same amount of algae as me even though I put 4 drops.

References

McMaster, Donna.(2008). "Archives: History." The American River. American River History,
Web. 17 Nov. 2014.
Zou, J., Huang, Y., Jiang, J., Zheng, X., & Sass, R. L. (2005). A 3year field measurement of
methane and nitrous oxide emissions from rice paddies in China: Effects of water regime,
crop residue, and fertilizer application. Global Biogeochemical Cycles, 19(2).