Homeostasis Lab

Description of Work

This was a project that was a little different from the others, in that our lab procedure was up to us. We were tasked with creating our own lab and experiment. Our only guideline was that we were experimenting on blood pressure homeostasis, which was a kind of homeostasis that we had chosen for our group to do. The purpose of the lab was to show the regulation of homeostasis, and how the body regulates its own blood pressure to return to its control rate if it is imbalanced, and how that imbalance works.

My group was made up of people that I knew relatively well, but had never actually worked with before. It consisted of Nathan Beaudette, Joy Chor and Giselle Shih. We decided that the best way to complete our objective was to do an experiment where we measured blood pressure before and a series of minutes after light exercise. With this information out in mind, we were able to complete a sheet that we had designed which was essentially asking how our homeostasis worked and for a brief overview of the experiment. After that, it took us a long time to decide on what kind of exercise we would be doing and for how long, but we eventually decided on a one-minute plank. From then on, we ran our experiment.

The experiments took a long time, because only one person in the group could be planking at one time and we had a to take a blood pressure test before the plank, immediately after the plank, one minute after the plank, and two minutes after the plank. We went in the order of Nathan, Joy, and Giselle planking. Our blood pressure measured at a wide variety, but we were able to trace a general pattern of the blood pressure rising after the plank, and then slowly cooling down to eventually match the resting blood pressure. With this data we were able to complete the sheet and begin creating our slide poster.

The creation of the slide poster was easier than we expected- we were able to divide and conquer by assigning one person to each section of the slide (abstract, introduction, hypothesis, procedure, data table, acknowledgements, graphs, and an analysis). We copied these onto the slide format provided by Ms. Matthews, the only change that we made in the format was changing the color of the background to a pink-purple fade and changing the color fonts. As for the document that had to be filled out, the information from the document was relatively the same as what we filled out the slide with, so we were able to copy and paste the general information.

Content

Homeostasis: The process in which the body maintains equilibrium through the regulation of its body systems. Our project was all about discovering why and how homeostasis pertains to our specific body function. This is what we are trying to prove in our experiment.

Glucose: A simple sugar that provides energy in organisms. Component of many carbohydrates. Glucose was a concept in our project because it the physical sugar in your blood.

Blood sugars: The amount of sugar in your blood is appropriately named blood sugars. Blood sugar levels were what we tested in our tests. The whole project was based on how the body responds to an increase in blood sugars aka. homeostasis.

Insulin: A hormone produced by the pancreas that regulates the blood sugar levels in your body. Insulin is the thing that combats your blood sugars and therefore is an essential part of the project.

Other Concepts: These two don't necessarily correlate, I think that the Ecosystems unit in ecology in some ways is similar to this one. When one thing is to changed or altered in the slightest, then the entire ecosystem will fall apart. In the event that one thing doesn't play it's part then it screws everything else up. In other words, each individual component is extremely important. This is, in my opinion, similar to how the body maintains homeostasis. Every individual cell plays an important role in homeostasis and if one thing is to come up short then sure the entire process will fail.

Reflection

On reflection this project didn't go quite as smoothly as the others have been in Biology this year, mostly because we spent a lot of time figuring out what our plan was going to be, but once we had committed to that plan, we got work done quickly. Two things that I did well in this project were work efficently and communicate well with my group-mates. As a group, we got work done efficiently, because we were able to complete the written portions of this project very quickly. We finished the worksheet on the day it was handed to us and assembled the slide poster in one day, as well as the document. We also had good communication throughout the project, we were always on the same page in terms of where my group is at. Also on the document and slideshow portion, we were able to communicate who was going to do what part of the project efficiently.

Two things that I feel that I could've worked on during the project is making a plan quicker and having a more effective time spent in the experiment portion of the project. As a group, it took us a long time to decide on what our plan of action was going to be and the steps we were gonna take to conduct our experiment. Also, when we did conduct the experiment process of our project, we did it slowly with questionable effectiveness.

Out of the Six C's the two that I demonstrated best in this project were communication and critical thinking. I think I demonstrated communication from how everyone in my group was on the same level of knowledge of what we were doing and how we divided the work up among ourselves. I think I demonstrated critical thinking in my understanding of the content we learned, using those principles to conduct the experiment, and analyzing our data to produce the best project.