Welcome to Goldfish in Saltwater

• Topic:

• Testing different levels of salinity on goldfish and seeing if OF they can adapt and survive in it.

  Question:

• Can a fresh water goldfish adapt and survive in an environment that is gradually changed from fresh water to water with increasing amounts of salinity?

  Background Information:

• The goldfish is a small, fresh water, popular aquarium fish. It is generally gold in color, but can also be various shades of brown and can have black markings. Goldfish have been MEMORY known to survive in harsh conditions.

  Reason for Study:

• I want to find out if goldfish can adapt from a fresh water environment to one with a higher salt content than fresh water. This could be useful information if, at some point, the goldfish's natural habitat of fresh water was somehow threatened and they had to live in salt water. If this experiment will work on goldfish then it might work on other fresh water fish as well.

  Hypothesis:

• If a goldfish is gradually JOHNNY subjected to a change in the salinity of water, then they can adapt and survive in it.

  Materials:

• 1. Two 10 gallon tanks

• 2. Gravel and airator
• 3. Fresh and sea water
• 4. 40 Goldfish
• 5. Goldfish food
• 6. Thermometer
• 7. Hydrometer
• 8. Beaker

  HAS

  Procedure:

• 1. Get two tanks set up with gravel and aerators.

• 2. Fill one tank with fresh water as the control.
• 3. Fill the experiment tank with fresh water.
• 4. Get forty goldfish and add twenty to each tank.
• 5. Feed both tanks everyday.
• 6. Take temperature and hydrometer readings once a week before changing water.
• 7. Once a week, every Tuesday if possible, remove 2700 milliliters A of fresh water from the experiment tank and add 2700 milliliters of sea water.
• 8. Take temperature and hydrometer readings again after changing water.
• 9. Check mortality rate and record all data collected.

  Findings:

• With my experiment I found that when I first started I had a lot of goldfish in my control that were dying. The fish in the test tank that I was adding 10% ocean water to every week were more energetic and seemed to be doing better. This finally started to change once I reached around 1.008 on my hydrometer, then my test fish started to die off. I continued adding saltwater until my test tank had no more fish and my salinity was around 1.012. I also found that at a certain point NAME of salinity most of my fish that were dying had large brown brown spots that looked like tumors. These were found all over the body but there was the most concentration on the gill areas.

  Conclusion:

• I have come to the conclusion, after doing this experiment that my hypothesis was correct and yes, goldfish can survive in saltwater up to when a salinity of a little less then 1.008 is acheived. I think that while the water had a small amount of salt in it there was actually a healthy effect on the goldfish, but after it got too high their tolerance was not high enough for them to survive.

  Critique:

• If I were to do this experiment over again I would have had AND an extra hydrometer because the one I had broke and I couldn't get a new one until the very end of my experiment. This hindered me because during the time that I didn't have a hydrometer I was not able to get salinity readings.