Mukilteo Water Quality Monitoring Service Learning

1. For my service learning, I did Water Quality Testing for 4 hours. Kacie McCarty was the event organizer, her email is kacie.mccarty@email.edcc.edu.
2. The goals and purpose of this event was to monitor the water quality of a stream in the Japanese Gulch. We did this to make sure the streams were healthy and learn about the different factors that go into that.
3. We tested the water quality by collecting data on E.coli levels, turbidity, hardness, pH, dissolved oxygen levels, and alkalinity. Throughout the event, everybody was able to help with multiple things, I helped with preparing a petri dish to look at E.coli levels and doing a titration to look at alkalinity.
4. This experience affected me and my thoughts on science and society because monitoring the health of streams is important to maintaining the overall health of an ecosystem. If the stream isn’t healthy, it affects everything surrounding it because all life relies on water to survive and that stream is probably a main water source for a lot of organisms. Consuming unhealthy is obviously bad for an organism. By monitoring the water quality, we can make sure that the ecosystem stays healthy. If we were to find anything bad or unusual, like high levels of E.coli or low pH, it would be reported to the city of Mukilteo who would take action if necessary. Even if there was nothing that required action, the data we collected could be sent to the city of Mukilteo. The role of science in society in this case is making sure that we maintain healthy streams which means a healthy ecosystem.
5. I was able to connect what I did during this project to what we have learned in class by thinking about how the environment affects organisms. This reminded me of the Daphnia heart rate lab where we looked at the effects of alcohol and nicotine on heart rate of Daphnia. It also reminded me of the research projects where a lot of groups looked at how changing the environment of an organism affected its behavior. In the Japanese Gulch stream, abnormal levels of any of things we measured would cause concern. For example, if the pH of the water was too high in the stream it would negatively affect the salmon or other types of animals living in or off the stream, which obviously isn’t good. This project has shown me how biology is interdisciplinary because I was able to connect a small, controlled experiment that we did in class to an entire ecosystem.
6. Four questions: 1) What would happen to the surrounding plants if any of the things we measured got too high? 2) Does location on the stream affect anything measured? 3) How do E.coli levels, turbidity, hardness, pH, dissolved oxygen levels, and alkalinity all affect each other? 4) Are there seasons where levels of each will peak?

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