Rot Race Lab Report Essays - Breads, Sliced Bread, Two-liter Bottle

Rot Race Lab Report To see how fast organisms and materials decay under certain conditions. Procedure: We gathered 4 2-liter plastic pop bottles and cut them to assemble the drawing below. Near the bottom we placed a siv to let juices drain through into the bottom 2-liter. Then we stacked materials and organisms on top of each other until it was about 20 cm tall. We then randomly poked holes into the sides of the pop bottles to let air escape. This is the order we placed the materials, from top to bottom; 2 cups of dirt, 13 pieces of melon, I cup of soil, 3 chunks of wax, 2 cut up bananas, 4 slices of apple, 1 banana peel, many slices of carrot peelings, 1 cinnamon roll, apple sauce, 1 slice of bread, and then the siv. Next we let it sit and made observations every Tuesday and Friday. We checked the color change, smell, height (cm), temperature (degrees Celsius), mass (lbs), Ph, and we checked for living organisms. Drawing of set-up: Conclusion: After the experiment we decided that the bread decomposed the best. I believe this because the bread was the most porous, which allowed more bacteria could get to it. We also decided that the wax decomposed the worst because it was the hardest and most compact. We knew that decomposition was taking place because mold was growing on some of the material and the height and mass were decreasing. When an organism decays it loses it size and mass just like our rot column. Improve: One of the ways that we could have improved our experiment is by placing the material on top of the other material and let it set, instead of mashing it and mixing it together. Also we could have put in materials that were harder to decompose. Another thing we could have done was to put more holes in the bottle. That would have let more air escape therefore it wouldn't have smelled as bad. Or maybe we should have placed our rot columns out side!