Lab Report

Introduction

Farmers need to find whether they can sustain a crop of spinach with high amounts of salt

in the water. Salty water can have a negative impact on the plants themselves, where through

osmosis the hypotonic plants will lose water and suffer. The salty weather usually accumulates in

arid areas, high rainfall areas, and agricultural areas. In all areas affected, solutions are being

worked on, such as pipelines to pump brine to the sea, but for now, the farmers must deal with

the implications of the salty water. The purpose of this study is to find the needed concentration

of salt in water to provide a lethal dose to spinach, as well as what are the mortality rates of

spinach when administered different concentrations of salt. We hypothesize that it will only take

a small amount of salt to be able to provide a lethal dose to the plant spinach.

Methods

First, measure 30 grams of soil and place it into all 6 rows of planters. (each planter has 5

“cells”).

Next take three seeds of spinach and place them into a half inch deep, quarter inch wide hole.

Next label and place popsicle sticks in each row to indicate the amount of water to be

administered (0 mg/l, 0.01mg/l, 0.1mg/l, 1mg/l, 10mg/l 1000mg/l).

Next water each with the indicated measurements of salt concentration.(0 mg/l, 0.01mg/l,

0.1mg/l, 1mg/l, 10mg/l 1000mg/l), with 20ml of water per pod.

Water every other day for a week, then study the results.

Count the amount of sprouted plants per row, divide by total of row (15 plants) for mortality rate.

Results

The graph shows a higher mortality when higher concentrations were reached, but some

results were inconsistent with the trend. At 1 mg/l, the mortality went down, while if it was

consistent with the trend, it should have risen. The line ended at a higher mortality rate than it

started, but was inconsistent throughout the different concentrations. At no point however, did

the mortality rate rise above 50% however, so it is not possible to determine the lethal dose.
Discussion

The data rejects our hypotheses of needing a low dose to kill spinach, meaning a low

LD50. In our experiment however, at no point did the mortality rate reach 50%, so there's we

could not find the LD50 using only the concentration levels stated before. Therefore, we can

conclude that spinach has a higher tolerance towards salt than he had believed previously. We

can infer that spinach is only slightly more hypertonic than the salt water we applied to it,

because it only absorbed little, and had little effect. There was however, at least some trend, so

the salt water did penetrate the cell membranes through osmosis. This data (if accurate) can be

used to help farmers determine whether the concentration of salt present in their irrigation water

can sustain a profitable or healthy crop of spinach.

Limitations/Drawbacks

One drawback is that the our seedlings were grown indoors, under a lamp and with warm

temperature. In real life, new seedlings could have been killed or harmed by regular weather

effects that our seedlings were not allowed to endure. Another limitation is that we only ran the

experiment for a week, so results that we would have seen some weeks later we could not

observe or study. It is possible that water from each planter mixed with each other, through a tray

they all sat on and shared, so this could have murked the date some bit. To prevent this, I would

recommend that each planter be separated and isolated from each other so that the water cannot

mix. I would recommend continuing the study for some weeks after the initial data collection, so

that the results can be expanded and they can become more accurate.