In this experiment Daphnia spp. were exposed to three concentrations of Copper Sulphate plus a freshwater control.
An individual adult Daphnia was placed in each well of three 24-well plates providing a total of 72 individuals. An N of 18 animals were exposed to (add conc's) CuSO4. Each plate was then placed inside a Zantiks MWP unit.
activity of Daphnia at varying concentrations of CuSO4
Potential learning outcomes:
- To gain understanding of ecotoxicology & setting environmental quality standards
- To gain understanding of how environmental pollution can impact animal behaviour
- To gain practical experience in measuring animal behaviours from video data
- To gain experience in handling large data sets from automatically generated behavioural data
- To compare and contrast manual versus automatically generated behavioural data and understand the pros and cons of both methods
- To understand how to apply appropriate statistical analysis to a dataset
- To understand how to generate an EC50 from experimental data
- To discuss potential benefits of using automatically generated behavioural data in standardised toxicity screening over traditional methods
Videos and corresponding data can be found here
