Oil Degraders
by Maria Fleyshgakker
I am a science teacher in the Martha Neilson School.
I teach Foundations of Science, Biology, and Earth Science. During several
years I've been teaching the course of Earth Science I developed a few projects
for my students. One of them is on Oil Spills. My students and I did some
research on different kinds of oil
spills and designed an experiment when we remove oil from the surface
of water using different mechanical ways. Both research and the experiment
can be developed and improved especially after all the things I learned in
this course.
First, to improve the research part of my students' projects:
in addition to their work with books, magazines, and newspapers; and in addition
to their work with the computer's encyclopedia and word processing, I am going
to include the use of internet as a part of their research assignment.
Second, to make the experimental part more interesting I will
include some microbiology. While taking this course I learned about oil degraders.
We have set an experiment described below which will become a part of my students'
project.
Setting of the experiment: We prepared 10 flasks: 2 - control,
4 - with oil and 4 - with moth balls. The medium we are using is broth in 4
flasks and Miracle Gro in the other 4. We also vary the inoculum: in 4 flasks
we have mud from the marsh and in
the other 4 - the mud from a stream that runs in the northern Westchester county.
We expect that both moth balls and the oil will be eaten by the
microbes in the mud but in the control flasks neither will change in size.
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