April Moorer, Weber State University
Life Sciences
Corexit is a dispersant used in the gulf of Mexico as a reactive measure to counteract the oil spill of April of 2010. Studies reveal that toxicity is produced and has impacted marine life. Research shows that reproductivity is diminished as a consequence. Paralysis, tumor development, and fatalities are also proven to occur. The purpose of this experiment is to study effects on the physiological structure of brine shrimp at various life stages resulting from the exposure to toxicity induced by corexit.
I performed experiments on the brine shrimp at both the larval phases and the juvenile phases that precede adulthood. For the larval experiment, I injected one cubic centimeter of shrimp larvae into a dish holding fifty milliliters of sea water. This was my control group I repeated this two times in order to have a total of three control group representatives. Next, I placed a cubic centimeter of larval shrimp into a dish containing a concentration with 1×10^-8 milliliters of corexit with two additional representatives hold the sane concentration. I repeated this process six times, increasing the concentrations by a tenth each time. Each with three representatives. I conducted the juvenile experiment will three control groups containing approximately twenty larvae in each dish of fifty milliliters of sea water. I created three representative dishes of concentrations from 1×10^-6 through 1×10^ -2 milliliters.
In the larval experiment a few of my larvae died from my control groups and an increasing number died as the concentration of corexit grew. At concentrations involving 1×10^-3 and 1×10^-2 milliliters of corexit, the larvae were almost one hundred percent dead. In the Juvenile stages, there was almost a viability rate of one hundred percent until the concentration containing 1×10 ^-2 milliliters. of corexit. Here there was a fatality rate of almost one hundred percent.