Chlorophyll on the Rise as Contaminated Algae Grows

Abstract

Water pollution is a common problem around the world; pollutants are introduced to water sources every day. With this observation, we wanted to investigate how different types of pollutants affect the growth of algae in water. In order to test this, we selected four different pollutants (ammonia, fertilizer, salt water and detergent), in which we combined 3 mL of the particular pollutant with 17 mL of water extracted from a pond located on the Lake Hefner Golf Course in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. We recorded chlorophyll levels at peak absorbance, and converted this data to chlorophyll content in order to predict algae growth. Our results showed that our hypothesis was partially supported, but we recognized that there could have been errors present in our data and for most effective results, it would be best to redo our experiment in the future.