Daphnia are a small genus of small planktonic crustaceans that eat algae on a microscopic scale.


To show that daphnia is actually beneficial in eating algae, we conducted a tests. From our daphnia population, we took exactly 20 adult daphnia and put them in a cup that had unidentified algae in it. The cup was 324 mL. We left the daphnia over a three day weekend and we will soon be able to come back and see the results.

Day One
​1/15/16

Day Four
​1/19/16

Day Six
1/22/16

Day Ten
​1/26/16

Day Eleven
​1/27/16

Results of Trial #1
  
Within 11 days the population of daphnia was able to remove the majority of our unknown algae culture.  We decided to end the trial after the 11th day because we were worried that the daphnia may be starving. Considering we were unable to identify the type of algae used in our experiment we decided to run a more specific test to generate better data.  

Daphnia and Species of Specific Cyanobacteria

After running the first test we are now running another test to determine if daphnia can consume a species of cyanobacteria that is known to be one of the leading species of cyanobacteria to produce cyanotoxins. We are doing this by having 3 test tubes filled with a specific species of cyanobacteria called Mycrocystis aeruginosa. We put our cultured daphnia in each of the 3 test tubes. The first test tube has 30 daphnia, the second has 20, and the last has 10 daphnia.  We altered the amount of daphnia in each sample from Carolina Biological to determine the ideal ratio of daphnia to water containing cyanobacteria.  Each day we took pictures and a video of our testing area to visually display the effectiveness of daphnia on the consumption of the cyanobacteria, Mycrocystis aeruginosa.    

DAY ONE
​January 29, 2016

DAY TWO
January 29, 2016

DAY THREE
January 30, 2016

DAY FOUR
February 1, 2016

DAY FIVE
February 2, 2016