The next three hours are going to be slightly academic. First, here’s a look at Kurt’s MQP abstract. At our college (WPI) all students are required to do three projects a Sufficiency, IQP, and MQP. IQP stands for Interactive Qualifying Project and MQP stands for Major Qualifying Project. We’ll follow this with his IQP abstract (exciting!!) and then we’ll conclude with the paper that I wrote for my international business class. Theresa helped me edit that one and it’s actually pretty darn good.
Anyway, Heeeeere’s Kurt!
MQP:
Bioenergetics Modeiling of Juvenile Rainbow Trout Growth: Population Dynamics and Food Consumption Effects.Using previous bioenergetics modelsfor fish species, we investigated the growth of juvenile rainbow trout, Oncorhynchus mykiss. Our experimentation had a few main objectives. (1)to determine the effects on growth caused by varying levels of food consumption and (2) to observe the effects on growth caused by the development of a dominance hierarchy while maintaining all other experimental variables. Previous modeling has showed that for adult rainbow trout as the weight of the fish increases, the amount of oxygen consumed decreases. In turn, to measure the effectsof food levels and population dynamicson our specimen we obtainedtheir weightsas well as their respiration rates at several points during our trial. From our analysis, we gathered that the young age of our fish varied the results from what we were expecting to obtain from previous models. However, although our data was not consistent with the model for adult rainbow trout, our results followed a similar trend regardless of food level or Dominance.
This project won me a cool 50 bucks, for placing third in the Project Presentation Day! I think I bought 2 cases of beer and a Meat Onslaught Sandwich from the Best Subway ever that day.