Fish in a Bowl in Water in Ice with Science

Fish in a Bowl in Water in Ice with Science

The snack that smiles back can really be useful when it comes to studying respiration.  Not really, but we did use actual goldfish to help us study the rate at which they breath at certain temperatures.  The first and probably most important step was to actually get the goldfish.  If you have already seen my previous post, you can see that I brought quite a few.  I still have them right now.

Anyways, we placed a goldfish into room temperature water and counted how often it took a breath in a minute.  We also did this with slightly warmer water and slightly colder water.  We repeated this on other fish to verify our data.  Beforehand, we predicted that the fish would breathe less in colder water.  Here are our results:

This graph and our data indicates that as we lowered the temperature of the water, the fish began to breathe less often.  So we were right with our hypothesis.  Other than just temperature, however, the fish may been affected by the size of the container or how panicked the fish were.  The average shows how a normal fish would breathe at certain temperatures.  A similar test that could have the same affects would be testing to see the rate at which the fish breathe when placed under a lamp and without one.  I believe that fish breathe less in cold water, because they are trying to store energy in such a cold environment, and they do that by breathing less.