Figure 1. The background noise of the measurement system. An oxygen electrode was placed into a sealed container along with an aquarium bubbler. Once equilibrium was reached, researchers took the mean of the three highest deviations from a straight line drawn over 10 minutes of output and estimated the background noise. According to our result the background noise was approximately ± 0.0153.
Figure 2. A typical experimental run beginning with a baseline and following the dissolved oxygen concentration over 20 minutes. All runs were carried out at room temperature (roughly 24 C), 290’ elevation, in a one liter container, three fish weighing 14.65 grams.
Figure 3. An XY scatter plot where the “x” (independent) variable was temperature (C)…show more content… Upon the addition of the bubbler the water became saturated with oxygen. The water became as concentrated as it possibly could and thus even though the fish were performing cellular respiration the bubbler was effective in re-oxygenating the water to the max. Excess air was unable to dissolve in the water because the water had reached its limit at each given temperature. Therefore, this constant and continuous re-oxygenation created an even, straight line at the beginning of our experiment as our system was open. This is because there was no difference in the concentration of oxygen over time. However, once the bubbler was moved and the system became closed, oxygen was not replenished as the goldfish carried out cellular respiration thus allowing us to measure the downward slope of the graph as less and less oxygen was present in the water. Once the trial was completed, we were able to confidently measure the loss of oxygen over time and then use such data to estimate the metabolic rate. Furthermore, because the changes of oxygen concentration over time were much greater than our predetermined noise variation of ± 0.0153, we could rule out the fact that noise variation influenced the change in dissolved oxygen levels and could attribute such changes to the goldfish carrying out cellular