Flax Pond Water Quality Report

Water Quality Study of Flax Pond in South Yarmouth, MA

Include in your lab report a title page. The title page should have an appropriate title, the date of submission, your name, period, and my name.

Follow the lab report format given in class. The report should include the purpose of the study, your hypothesis (given back to you from a homework assignment), discussion section on three factors used to determine water quality, your data table with calculations, and a one or two sentence conclusion based on the data.

This report is worth a test grade.

Flax Pond Water Quality Study

What to collect!

Your team will collect biotic and abiotic samples from Flax Pond, a kettle pond formed 10,000 years ago by the retreat of a glacier in South Yarmouth, Massachusetts.

Your collective goal is to determine the relative water quality of the pond. You will decide if that quality is good enough to support a diversity of life in the pond. Your team must come back to D.Y. with six samples of water for testing in the lab. They include nitrates, phosphates, fecal coliform, total solids, and biochemical oxygen demand. Additionally, while at the pond your team will bring back data on water temperature, dissolved oxygen, pH and turbidity.

Lastly, the class will bring back buckets of muck to examine for and identify benthic macroinvertebrates.

Baked Potato Invertebrate Trap

Objective: To trap and observe soil organisms.

On Wednesday, we will take a field trip to study a kettle pond but also to trap some soil organims. We will use three baked potato halves per study group. We will place them on a site Wednesday, and check them on Friday.

You will be asked to identify differences in the type of organisms at each site. You also must explain why these differerences might occur. We will also collect soil samples to bring back to the lab to see if there are other organisms within the soil.
Are soil organisms considered good or bad?

Prepare your field notebooks and get your field study clothes ready.