Farewell and Best Wishes
As this research project is now in the final stages of wrapping-up, we wish to thank everyone who participated in this inquiry; the students, mentors, teachers and others behind the scenes. We appreciate all of your efforts and contributions to this online learning community.

Scientific exploration is a process of discovery that can be fun! There are many unanswered questions about plants just waiting for new scientists to consider, investigate, and share.

After the end of the session, we will be updating the platform and archiving groups and projects, after which time new updates/posts will not be able to be added to projects or groups. Please come back and visit the PlantingScience Project Gallery anytime to view this project in the future. You can search the Gallery by keyword, team name, topic, or school name.

Good bye for now.
Warm regards,
The PlantingScience team

My best wishes to all of you!

Hi team, thank you for the report. It is common, when you do an experiment for the first time, that you run into some glitches, and it looks as if your group saw some examples. If you had to do it again, or if you had to advise another group of students who want to address the same question, what would you do different or what would you tell the new group? 

I am curious how much and what kind of fertilizer you applied.  Did the soil get any fertilizer? How much fish feed did you use and did the fish eat all of it? And ... how big were the fish? 1" 10"? ...  Why do you think that I am asking these questions?  :-)

You mentioned testing of the water for nutrients, etc.  -- did you record any data from those and could anything be concluded from those?

The temperature of the hydroponic system seems to be cooler than the other two systems – could this have affected radish growth?  Would radishes grow best under warm or cool conditions?

I presume the growth measurements were from the ... seed? to the tip of the longest leaf, or something along those lines?

Lots of questions -- is there anything I haven't asked yet, that I should have asked? :-)

All the best!

 

 

 

Hello, we re-uploaded the files

Hi team,

Welcome back from Spring Break! At your earliest convenience, please kindly re-upload the report in a compatible format so that your mentor can help provide feedback. Thanks so much!

Paul - Your scientist liaison :)

Hi team!

It looks as though you are trying to share a Google document. Unfortunately, this is not compatible with our platform, and you will need to save the file as a Word document or a PDF and share it in the "Files" tab. Thank you!

When I click on the "Bubble Guppies- Agriscience Fair Written Report Te…plate.gdoc" I am told that I cannot download a 0kb file.  Is it really 0 kb? Almost anything should make it more than that

Looks like you are in the final stages of your projects.
It’s great to see that teams from your school are wrapping up and posting conclusions. Enjoy the final stages of your project, and feel free to post any final comments or questions you have for your mentors.

The fish came from the aquaponic system and when he (or she) was removed, the plants started growing while they had not been growing before? Is this pattern clear? (all the plants, or just a few of them?). And you are wondering whether the presence of the fish could have inhibited the growth of the plants? I wouldn't immediately be able to explain such a phenomenon -- can you think of ways it might be explained?

We did the water tests to be able to see what could be affecting the growth of our plants. One of the fish has died and we believe he had a flesh eating disorder. He had scales missing and what looked like to be blood on his side. After removing him from the system to see if he could heal, the plants actually started to grow in the aquaponic system. Could that have possibly been affecting the growth of or plants?

Thank you for the update. My ability to comment and ask questions is somewhat hampered by the fact that it is not all that clear to me what exactly is being done in your experiments. Scientists often cannot see first-hand what others are doing, and rely on detailed descriptions to find out.  For example, I googled up "urban water test kit" and found that there are a number of different types and brands that will test for either a large number or smaller number of things. You do provide some additional information.  But I think there is almost no chance that there are no bacteria in your hydroponic system ... unless you sterilized everything and then somehow kept it sterile (not easy to do). You probably mean that the test for bacteria came up negative, but it was probably testing for only certain types of bacterial, and there is probably a detection limit so that very small populations could not be detected (and should not be detected because they have little meaning for the health-related qualities of drinking water). Anyway, will you all be writing up some sort of a report in due time, describing what exactly you did, and what the results and conclusions are?  I know, sounds like a lot of work :-)

Hi Mr. Baudoin we took your advice and planted three more seeds in each system. Therefore, we have a total of 6 seeds in each. We called the added seeds "Trial 2" and so far the growth has been almost immediate. Also our teacher, gave us a urban water test kit, and we are testing the PH balance and contents of our water. For example, we gathered water from both the hydro and aquaponic system, and soil from the conventional and tested the amount of iron, phosphate, copper, chlorine, copper and dissolved oxygen. Based on this testing we found out there is bacteria in our aquaponic system but not in our hydroponic system.

How many seeds did you plant in each system? Only three? A larger number would give you a better chance to spot any differences.  How many seeds would you need in order to tell the difference between, say, 90% and 60% germination? Is it still possible to plant more (but keep track of planting date)?

So far in our aquaponics system only 1 of our seeds are budding, one got destroyed by our water filter, and the other seed has shown no progress so far. In our hydroponics system we have two seeds that have grown and the other has no progress. In our conventional system only one of our seeds have grown while there is no progress in the other two.

Our plan is to figure out which way of planning is the best.We will test a hydroponics, aquaponics, and the conventional way of planting. For the hydroponic we have used a cut gallon, rockwool, and styrofoam. For the aquaponics we used the same size gallon, a aquarium filter, 4 freshwater fish, rockwool, and styrofoam. We will measure the growth of the plant and the water temperature. We will keep the watering and feeding of the fish constant. We will use our science notebooks to record our data.

This is what the entry says but apparently does not show, sorry for the inconvenience.

Perhaps, I cannot see the entire description of the experimental design?  It ends with " gallon, a aquarium filter, 4 freshwater fish,..." which seems incomplete.

Steven, thanks for the explanation. It's just that from the pdf file with picture and the notebook pages, it's hard for me to puzzle out exactly how your systems work and what you can compare.  I presume that you will provide further explanation at some point?  I received a boatload of PlantingScience alerts this afternoon that the project had been updated, but I cannot find very much change.

Looks like you have been busy constructing the units. Apologies for not having asked this question earlier, but I guess I was assuming you would spell out the plans a little more. I am not completely clear on your experimental set-up.  Does each of your containers have fish?  If you try to address the question “How will fish impact the growth of our radishes?”, if the plants grow well (or not), how can you tell whether the fish have an effect?  Shouldn’t there also be a unit with radishes but no fish? I don’t know if fish feed without fish would have any fertilizer effect. Or did you decide to modify the research question?

By the way, I will be attending a meeting Wednesday through Friday of this week, so probably will be able to check for any updates only in evenings.

Thank You Mr. Baudoin, sorry for the delay, we'll try to inform you more often next week! This week has been slow, and we finally put together our 3 systems, aquaponics, hydroponics, and soil. 

I'll keep an eye on the "Files" tab ...

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Journal

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hydroponics

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soil 

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aquaponics

 

 

Hi teams!

We have removed several posts with links to Google documents. In order to maintain student privacy, please DO NOT post last names, links to Google or Sharepoint documents, or social media handles.

Please share files (Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, Power Point slides, images) in the "Files" tab to the left of this text area.

Thank you for your cooperation!

Alright, I am curious to find out what you will be comparing.  Looks like you may have a bit of a construction projects on your hands, with tanks and pvc pipes and ...

That is so interesting. Being in an AG class for 3-4 years we have learned to appreciate plant science a lot more than we did before being in an AG class. Which makes us super excited to be working on this project. Also we just wanted to let you know we have expanded our project. Instead of focusing on how different types of fish affect plant growth, we are going to have an aquaponic system, hydroponic system, and the conventional way of planting (using soil), focus on which system is best for plant growth.

How I got into plant pathology? That happened in a series of steps. I was interested in plants, animals, birds, insects, and all kinds of critters since about first grade, but during my elementary through high school years, I didn’t even know that something like plant pathology existed (probably true for most kids). Towards the end of high school, I had to decide what area I was most interested in: biology, chemistry, meteorology, agriculture … and just picked the latter because I thought it would be nice to do something that had practical applications and allowed one to spend time outdoors. Then … I had to decide between agronomy, horticulture, plant breeding, plant protection, …As Yogi Berra is reputed to have said “when you come to a fork in the road, take it.” I might add: if you enjoy the scenery, keep going. If not, turn around and try the other one.  So I took the plant protection path, and then plant pathology, and haven’t regretted it one bit.  But it might have worked out the same if I had picked horticulture or entomology, or many other things.

Thank you for sharing Mr. Baudion, that is really interesting. What made you want to specialize in plant pathology? Yes our radishes will be floating in water and we will use rockwool as the substitute for soil.

Hey, thank you for your group introduction, and I hope to hear from all of you – what you each are interested in.  To introduce myself, I live in Virginia and  teach college courses on plant pathology, that is, on plant diseases: blights, rots, mildews, etc..  The crops we grow and that provide our food, fiber, etc. (you can think about what the “etc.” might all involve; plenty of agriculture going on in California) can be damaged by diseases that can be caused by fungi, bacteria, viruses, or a few other things.  Among human diseases, bacteria and viruses are most common, but for plant diseases, fungi are the most common cause.

 

Most of my research recently has focused on grape diseases, and especially on fungicide resistance. Grapes suffer from some damaging diseases caused by fungi, and commercial growers treat their grapes with regular fungicide sprays to prevent these diseases from developing. They do that in California, too, but don’t have to worry about quite as many diseases because of the dry weather during the growing season. Fungicide resistance has become a big problem, a situation similar to the use of antibiotics in human medicine: if you use them too much, after a while they may not work anymore. I also collaborate with other scientists on a project on boxwood blight (boxwoods are landscape ornamentals, and this disease was first detected in North America in 2011; it is now found in California as well), and control of weeds and invasive plants with plant pathogens.

 

I don’t think I have ever been to Mendota, but I lived in Southern California for a couple of years, way back when, and my wife is from Bakersfield, CA, so we have spent time in the Central Valley. Anyway, I look forward to hearing more about your plans for the project.  I presume the radishes are going to be floating on the water?

Good Afternoon Mr. Baudoin,

We are the Bubble Guppies, our team conists of four members, Hannah, Jenises, Nitzy, and Steven. We are currently seniors at Mendota High School and we have been in an AG class for 3-4 years. Our project will consist of growing radishes in aquaponic systems, which will include different types of freshwater fish.We are are excited and determined to fully see this project through alongside with you. Thank you for taking the time to work with us, you are highly appreciated. 

Respectfully,

Bubble Guppies

Thank you to your liaison, Paul, for welcoming you to PlantingScience! We just have one more thing to add to his message.

PLEASE ONLY CLICK "Share with team" ONCE. Sometimes the page takes a little while to refresh, so please be patient!

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We will remove these items as we find them in posts.

Welcome to your PlantingScience project page!

Welcome to this community of plant researchers. As your team plans and conducts your own research project, you will be mentored by a scientist. The mentor's role is to encourage and guide you through the process of scientific discovery. The more you share your ideas and research information online, the more your mentor can help. You can also find out more about your mentor. What is their research about? Why did they go into science? What do they like to do when they are not working?

You may also hear from this classroom’s assigned scientist liaison (Paul!). Liaisons work with several mentors and help make sure the conversations are going strong. Paul may also offer some extra advice or encouragement.

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Paul (Your Scientist Liaison)