Wednesday, July 21, 2010


So today we went to go see a some sort of Pitt lab. Apparently, they were testing pesticides on not only one thing, like a tadpole in a petri dish, but a whole ecosystem with not only tadpoles, but also snails and plankton and crustaceans oh my! There were more than forty of the tub like test groups so i guess it must be one heck of a job to get the readings from all those. After seeing the test tubs we went to a small stream where there were nets full of different kinds of leaves like maple and oak and we soon discovered that different aquatic invertebrates eat different "stuff."

2 comments:

Questioner said...

Did the test involve adding pesticides and seeing what happened to the tadpoles, or just looking at how tadpoles had been affected by pesticides that had already made their way to the tadpole's environment?

laura said...

The research did involve adding different levels and combinations of pesticides to the "ponds" to monitor the effect on the life in the pond. Very interesting!