The Adverse Effects of Heterosigma alga on sheephead minnow fish
What would happen if the whole world's fish and shellfish population were to become wiped out, due to Heterosigma algae bloom out-competing all the other green, brown, and red algae plankton, infesting all the waterways and every ocean?
Large amount of nitrogen and phosphorous in aquatic ecosystems are in both freshwater and saltwater. It can result in increased growth rate of bacteria, algae and aquatic plants. The algae blooms can become toxic. This can kill fish and shellfish that feed from the phytoplankton. This in turn can lead to human poisoning when these animals are consumed. Not only do algae blooms kill aquatic life that eat them, but they deplete the oxygen in the water. This effect would wipe out fish and shellfish populations and is the main reason why we are studying the adverse effects of Heterosigma alga.
What we have in our lab are the sheephead minnow fish. The fish live in saltwater, a warm climate, and produce a lot of larvae. We want the male to spawn in our fish tanks that are set up for them to reproduce. Eventually we will introduce Heterosigma with the fish and their larvae. We have been growing our own Heterosigma cultures and counting the cells that are growing from our own stock of Heterosigma. The Coulter Counter helps us to count our cells. We also place a small amount of cultures on a slide and count our cells by using a hemocytometer to determine the total cell count from a light microscope and to see more of the cells that we are working with.
We will add Heterosigma to the fish tanks in the final part of our experiment to see the effects of this to the fish's larvae. As the sheephead minnow reproduce, we will count the cells that are dead or alive, and determine the effects of Heterosigma in this respect. We hope to find in our study what can survive by Heterosigma algae and the animals that eat it.
