Dylan Radford UR, First Clorophyll Extraction!

This was a fairly interesting week in lab. Our class was divided up and while the others were at Tomoka getting on the boat, my group was in the lab ready to run the tests on our water samples that we were required to bring in. My water sample was retrieved from Sawgrass Point Dock along Spruce Creek. When we first got to class our speaker gave us a presentation on what we would be doing, new equipment we would be using and why it is important to know the Chlorophyll levels in different water ways and ecosystems. After that, we were to go back to the lab and start running our normal tests that we did the first time we brought water samples to class. This included testing things like Salinity and Filtrate. Now that all of those categories was tested we had to let our samples soak in a chemical. after 30 minutes of letting our samples soak we got to use a new instrument called a Fluorometer.

Fluorometer

This scientific instrument is used to collect Turbidity and Aquaflour measurements. It gets These readings by shining UV light through your sample and Identifying the levels of Aquaflour  and turbidity. Finally after we all got our readings from our samples, we put the information into Excel and made a bar graph that had some pretty interesting results. I think it is pretty amazing that I am able to use all of these different kinds of scientific instruments in class. I can tell that it is preparing me for what is to come! I am really excited for next week because it is my groups turn to go out on the boat in Tomoka. I have never been on the Tomoka river even though I have lived near it my entre life. It should be a fun experience!