Service Learning Water Quality Monitoring

          My service learning is water quality monitoring in Big Gulch streams in Mukilteo (Service-Learning Opportunity - Water Quality Monitoring). It starts at 10:00 am – 2:00 pm total of 4 hours and this event is sponsored by EdCC Anthropology Dept. & Center for Service-Learning, and their email is Kacie.mccarty@email.edcc.edu. The goals of the event are to monitor the water quality around the Big Gulch streams in Mukilteo. If we find out there are some weird data show up, we could notice certain department to take action. This service learning relates to animal Biology because water quality could affect the animal living around that environment, which are related to  genetic drift. Since the water quality is one of the factors in the environment that will affect the population of different animal living around there. For example, if the E. coli rate is too high, the salmon living near the Big Gulch streams might die. Knowing the water quality not only help understand the condition where the fish are living, it would also helpe human by noticing is the beach water quality safe for human to swim.

         

          During the service learning, we check the pH, E. coli, turbidity, temperature, Hardness, and Dissolved Oxygen. Before we start any water quality monitoring, we first needed to find a place to safely get to the stream. Then, we used a pipette to get some water from the stream and transfer it to 4 different plates with liquid gel. Since we need to wait for it to become a gel, we move on to do the dissolved oxygen inside water. We used two bottles to get some water in the stream and then we add some chemical to stabilize the oxygen concentration in the water and wait for the liquid to dissolve, meanwhile we move on to check the Turbidity by comparing the stream water and clear water; we kept adding some other chemical to balance the clear rate between the stream water and clear water until they both look the same. Next, we check the pH in stream water by comparing it with the standard pH color. After that, we check the hardness by adding some chemical in the stream water we retrieve from the stream until it turns pink and we record the number. We return to do the dissolved oxygen by doing titration, we add some chemical until the liquid turn pink. Lastly, we used the thermometer to measure the temperature in the stream and pick up the E. coli gel. During this service learning, I helped reading procedure, and perform the experiment. I helped get the correct amount of water from the stream, mixing chemical and compare the data.

         

           After this service learning, I learned how useful and important the titration and others science knowledge is. This is the first time that I had actually use a techniques we had learned in lab in a real-life situation. Like the titration in chemistry lab, and the gel for E. coli in Biology 211, it helps us to accurately measure the data we wanted. I felt satisfy after realizing the knowledge we learned in class isn’t just some meaningless words in reality, and knowing the science and biological impact behind this service learning.

The 4 question I had after this experience:

How would each data we measure (pH, E. coli, turbidity, temperature, Hardness, and Dissolved Oxygen) specifically affect the animal around that environment?

 Is the water quality monitoring frequent enough to record the changes in the stream?

When measuring turbidity, we only using our eyes to compare the clear and stream water, is that accurate enough?

What action will be made, if any of the data we measure (pH, E. coli, turbidity, temperature, Hardness, and Dissolved Oxygen) got too high or too low?