The Western Pond: Quack Quack, from Hays

This topic submitted by Hays Cummins (haysc@muohio.edu) on 2/16/03. Additions were last made on Tuesday, January 16, 2007. Section: Cummins/Kaufman

Hello,

Thanks for the proposal submission. My comments below are gentle critiques meant to help improve your proposal. So,......., without further adieu,...

My comments:

I appreciate the genuine effort here!

Divide your proposal into distinct, labeled sections such as Introduction, Methods, Experimental Design, Core area addressed, etc. It just makes it clearer to read.

I like the interdisciplinary aspects of your project. Bravo!

Some of your references science articles (and others) are excellent. But, that brings up the issue of how you integrated each article's information into your proposal. Each source needs to be integrated into the "body of your work." The annotated biblography is good, but, I wanted to see these works more integrated into your proposal!

I was surprised that you didn't reference the Western Pond Project from last year's river course.entitled The Turkey Duck Avengers They have lots of info concerning their project. Just click on the link: Western Pond: The Turkey Duck Avengers Take a look! One science component of their project was fecal coliform bacteria. The birds in the pond poop a lot!

I don't know what scientific hypotheses you are testing. In fact, I'm not sure you have any. So,.....please give this some serious thought. What predictions do you have? For instance, what do you hope to learn from testing pH? Why would you test pH in the pond when the bedrock may buufer the pH levels? The same questions are reasonable for the other chemiccal tests as well. What do you expect to see and why? As compared with what?

If you will be testing the chemical parameters of the pond, you need to have an aggressive, statistically valid plan. You need to further expand upon your actual samppling methods, locations of samples (and why you chose your locations). Would you sample many location sin the pond? In the stream entering the pond? Exiting the pond? What will you be comparing the pond to?

The fish shocker is most effective in shallow water. The pond depth is over you head, so,..the fish zapper will not work.

You coulkd look at algae cover on the rocks within the pond though. You might predict that the pond rocks would be covered with algae (due to excess nutrients in the pond), particularly as compared with the rocks in the stream entering the pond.

So,...whew!, here are a few of my suggestions. Overall, an excellent beginning. I looking forward to your proposal revision!

best,
Hays

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