Pico Reef Science Fair Project

[jgoldsney]

Howdy Y'all,

I am working with my Son on a science fair project. We would like to use Reefs as our base topic however I would like to focus on one particular area.

There are 2 directions we are looking at taking.

1) Why are the reefs around the world in danger

OR

2) Focus on coral propigation and re-stock the tank with only localy grown frags.

I personaly like option number 2 but my wife thinks ooption 1 has a lot of pottential.


We have an Iq3 pico tank that will be the centerpeice of our project. The tank was running successfully in his room for a little over a year however it got nuked this summer with the heat wave. We were away for a few days during a heat wave and we forgot to take the tank down to the bsmt. (one of the benifits of a pico). Temps hit over 37° in the house and the tank cooked. The real benifit of this tank is that with it's size it is really easy to transport and won't cost a ton to get stocked up again.
The last tank was mostly zoas and mushrooms with some GSP and pulsing xenia. I think I will prob stick to the Zoas and mushrooms as the GSP and the Xenia kind of took over. I had a 2 headed frogspawn frag that did really well and I may add this to the list for a little motion in the tank.

The lighting was a DIY LED however I am thinking of ordering a PAR30 from boostled.com if they have a black friday sale.

Here is a tank shot

http://i47.photobucket.com/albums/f160/jgoldsney/utf-8BU3RyYXRoY29uYSBDb3VudHktMjAxMTAyMTYtMDAxMTYuanBn .jpg


Thoughts?


Joel

[Proteus]

I think option 1 would be more suited to science with global warming and co2saturation in the ocean but option 2 could lean into repopulating reefs around the world

[soapy]

I think option 1 would be more suited to science with global warming and co2saturation in the ocean but option 2 could lean into repopulating reefs around the world

In addition to these issues there is also overfishing, (loss of large herbivores, ie. algae eaters) and excess nutrients from agricultural runoff and sewage leading to algal blooms. So short term, pollution and ecosystem tampering are big problems.

[jgoldsney]

I was thinking that the polution/Co2 aspect of things has been done many times on various projects. The concept of aquaculture both reducing the damage to the wild as well as restoring the reefs is a more unique perspective and a little less main stream than the standard Polution/CO2 band wagon.

[SeaHorse_Fanatic]

I have helped quite a few of younger students with Science Fair projects over the years.

From my perspective, I think option one would involve a lot more explanation of what is going wrong with our reefs/oceans and the Pico would be there mainly to show what it should look like. I don't imagine you're going to change the pH or raise the temp, for instance, to demonstrate the ecological problems. The pico would more or less be a prop to attract people over but wouldn't actually demonstrate the major environmental issues threatening our oceans' reefs.


Option two would be a better demonstration of how what humans destroy, other humans can do their part to try to save. Have him explain the benefits of aquaculture, not just of corals, but also of fish so that even if wild populations are threatened by environmental problems and overfishing, we can still do our small part to help save the various species from extinction.

Just my two cents.

Anthony

[Proteus]

I agree. I think most people understand our destruction. But not how we can protect and rebuild what we've destroyed

[mrhasan]

I would vote for number 2 also. Being into sustainable researches, I think its more important to show how people are becoming more and more cautious about certain impacts and helping to rebuild the ecosystem instead of just showing and complaining about what we are doing - something, according to me, won't be very encouraging for a science fair project. Plus number one would be more debatable along with many people claiming "you are also disturbing the nature by having those corals in a small tank".

[SpikeJones]

You can also look into crown of thorns star fish which are consuming coral due to global warming

[jgoldsney]

Thanks for the input!
This has been so helpful.

[Coralgurl]

I saw a show a few weeks ago where a guy actually had a frag section in the ocean to grow corals and was then actually gluing the frags to the rocks. I can't remember the name of the show, but basically the group doing this was on their own and the project was going to come to an end due to funding. It would tie in with your option 2 to show what we've learned in the hobby, is actually being used to repopulate the reefs or vise versa. I'll try to look it up when I get home. (hope this makes sense...long day...)

[mrhasan]

I saw a show a few weeks ago where a guy actually had a frag section in the ocean to grow corals and was then actually gluing the frags to the rocks. I can't remember the name of the show, but basically the group doing this was on their own and the project was going to come to an end due to funding. It would tie in with your option 2 to show what we've learned in the hobby, is actually being used to repopulate the reefs or vise versa. I'll try to look it up when I get home. (hope this makes sense...long day...)

I guess you might be talking about this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjGUoR-CLK0

[Coralgurl]

Not the same video but same idea!

[duncangweller]

I'm in the wrong job!

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk 2

[lockrookie]

As far as it goes you can e corporate both into the project easy enough


Sent from my porcelain aquarium

[Ian]

I will chime in from the perspective of a science teacher

The best science fair projects ask a question and then seek to find an answer to this question by doing an experiment.
Your 1st option would seem to be more of a research project ( write a report) than an actual experiment.
Your 2nd option would have a bunch of great directions you could go as far as performing an experiment. For this reason I would follow that line of thought.

Whichever way you choose be sure to nail down your Question first and then go after ananswer. But both of you have fun with it !

[jgoldsney]

Ian,

You have pointed out the one thing that is got me a little stumped. The concept of doing a project around his tank is exciting but what question should we be trying to answer. The one I am thinking of is "can a reef be created from only aquacultured corals". Since we are restarting from scratch it won't be hard to do a proof of concept with his pico. If we proved the concept in the pico we could extrapolate this to the real world.

[SeaHorse_Fanatic]

My Nano Reef Contest entry will be populated completely with aquacultured corals and fish, so it will be a similar idea.

[jgoldsney]

Well we have talked it over and we think that our question will be

"Can aquacultured corals restore a reef"

My son's astute hypothysis thanks to years of watching my tanks and his is that yes they can but we will be proving this conceptually with his pico reef.

I wan't to get it set up this weekend and take some base line pictures and then stock it as much as I can over the next 2 weeks. Then we can chart the progress over the next few months and observe the coral growth.

I know that really SPS corals would be really what rebuilds a reef but the principle will be the same.

Anyone in edmonton care to donate a frag or 2 :)