How Caffeine Affects the Heart Rate of Daphnia

Essay by Tinsel06High School, 11th grade January 2008

download word file, 5 pages 0.0

IntroductionThe purpose of this experiment is to determine whether or not caffeine has an affect on the heart rate of DaphniaHypothesisThe Daphnia heart rate will increase with the concentration of caffeine.

I based my hypothesis on the fact that humans heart rates increase with caffeine as it acts as a stimulant drug.

In the experiment there will be several variables that I need to try and control, the temperature of the water is one of these because if the temperature is higher or lower on the day the results may end up being higher or lower, this would make my results inaccurate. I need to try and limit the human error in the experiment as the daphnia heartbeat is very quick so it will be hard to be completely accurate so we are using the “blind method”.

We need to use the same microscope throughout testing as others may have different strength lenses.

I am also going to keep the species of daphnia the same, as different species may react differently to the caffeine. I will use the same type of caffeine and record the amount of time the daphnia spend in the caffeine before the counting begins, and try to keep this to a similar range.

The independent variable I will change is the concentration of caffeine in the water. I am going to be testing 0.1%, and 0.5% caffeine and also a distilled water trial. This means I will be able to see if the heart rate is greater with caffeine or not. The variable we are going to measure is the rate of the Daphnia’s heartbeat and to do this we will use a microscope to count the heartbeats of the Daphnia for 15 seconds. This makes it more accurate as the heartbeat is fast...