Water Quality Monitoring Service Learning

Bio 212 Service Learning

For my service learning project I volunteered for 4 hours with the Water Quality Monitoring in Mukilteo. The leader for this event was Kacie Mccarty, her email is kacie.mccarty@email.edcc.edu. This event was sponsored by the college, and the purpose for it was to monitor different qualities of the water to make sure it remains safe for the organisms in the ecosystem. My duties at this event were to guide the group in the procedures for monitoring the hardness of the water, and participate in the procedure for checking the amount of dissolved oxygen in the water.

Figure 1: This box contained all the different chemicals and equipment we used to do the different tests on the water quality. Some of these tests included water pH, water hardness, alkalinity, dissolved oxygen, etc.

These petri dishes contained some of the water from the stream and were prepared to check the E. coli levels in the stream, however these were just prepared to be checked later by other people once the E. coli had grown.

This experience was a fun experience that enhanced my view of science in society. Previously I did not know how easy it was to actually measure water quality, and did not truly understand the importance of doing it. However, after this experience I now understand that the procedures for water quality monitoring are fairly simple to perform and only require a few chemicals, some common scientific materials, and only a basic knowledge in performing scientific procedures. I also learned that the procedures for checking many different aspects of water quality can all be performed relatively quickly. Another thing I realized because of this is all the different aspects that must be considered when assessing the water quality for organisms living in the environment. I thought before that as long as we did not dump trash in the water that the water quality would be fine, however there are many different aspects to water quality that can be affected by a number of different variables. Overall this experience helped me see that water quality monitoring is an extremely important procedure to preserving our ecosystems, and the ease by which it can be performed means that is should be done often so any negative changes to water quality can be caught early and counteracted.

Doing this project for service learning helped me make a connection to what we were learning in class about the importance of animals maintaining homeostasis. We learned in class there are many complex ways animals maintain homeostasis inside their bodies. While animal hormones can help regulate certain things inside an animal’s body, this service learning project helped me realize that animals do not have as much control over what is outside their body which can affect them drastically. For example, I learned in class that animals must regulate many different internal factors so their cells can function properly. One of these factors that must be regulated is the pH of their blood so it does not become damaging to the cells and so the enzymes inside them can remain functional. Doing this water quality monitoring helped me realize that an organism like a fish that lives in the water at these places is highly dependant on the pH of the water being within a healthy range, otherwise there is not much homeostatic regulation can do to save the fish from being harmed by the unhealthy pH level. This is why it is important for us to monitor the water, because if our presence has an impact on the quality of the water that shifts the pH to an unhealthy level it is our job to fix our mistake so we do not kill organisms unnecessarily and disrupt the ecosystem for everything living there.

Another thing that I learned from this project is the role of biology as it relates to other sciences. In this project we were looking at how the water affects the organisms in the environment, which is related to ecology and biology. However in order to study this we used different chemistry techniques, such as titration, to test the water quality and assess how it might affect the organisms. This showed me that the real world applications of the sciences do not simply rely on one base for scientific knowledge, but combine multiple disciplines to study how we affect the world around us.

Some questions I had after doing this project were what are some of the different organisms that live in Big Gulch and Japanese Gulch? Also, how was it determined what were the organisms safe ranges were for the different criteria we measured? Furthermore, if we discovered that some of the qualities of the water were at unsafe levels, how would those be fixed? Finally, is water quality monitoring required to be performed by the local government and how often is it done to ensure the safety of organisms in the area?