Also to ensure safety whilst collecting data, we did not go into the sea itself or disturb any wildlife that was irrelevant to the task at hand. To further the safety we all wore sensible clothes for the occasion and ensured we were with a partner all of the time in case of an accident. Additional Information I have personally researched the lifestyles and habitats of limpets, periwinkles and seaweed. Information that I have recovered entails facts only about limpets.
Courtesy of AOL Search: =Limpet > http://www.geocities.com/ohp/sealife “Limpets are included in a grouped species of sea snails that are present all over the world. You may find them clinging to rocks or pieces of timber. Their homes are usually a scraped out region of rock as large and as thick as their shells. During the day they search for food. They live on algae on the rocks. Limpets use their tongues on their underside to scrape algae from the rocks and into their feeding glands.”
This gives a little more insight into the habitats of limpets. I daresay it has little to do with my hypotheses at this time, but it is relevant to the investigation and may prove a point linked into my hypotheses later in the investigation. Although I did try to find out some information on periwinkles’ habitats and seaweed, my attempts were unsuccessful. But the information above could help to the understanding of sea life and habitats of the other data collected.
Evaluation My overall aim at the beginning of this investigation was to prove these hypotheses: The limpets are larger with distance from the sea. Where there are large amounts of seaweed there will be many periwinkles. Where there are more periwinkles there will be fewer limpets. I began to use different methods of displaying data and finding more information from the data that I had collected, to find out the most accurate results from the amounts of data that I had obtained earlier. I think that I have produced substantial amounts of evidential information to prove my hypotheses sufficiently. Although I have proved my hypotheses I still think there are ways I could have improved the accuracy of my displayed information.
One obvious way to make my results more accurate would be to collect more information. This would mean another sampling method would have to have been used or alterations made to my original method. This would have been done in the first place but time limits restricted me from doing this. Another way to ensure more accurate results would be when I was measuring the limpets heights and counting the numbers of limpets and periwinkles. Although the rulers I used were extremely accurate I may have made slight mistakes whilst measuring and I may have been inaccurate by just a couple of millimetres. But this would still affect my results. Also there was no way that I could totally ensure that all of the limpets and periwinkles per quadrat were counted because some may have been in unreachable places.
Quite a inaccurate method that I used was for measuring the percentage of seaweed per quadrat. This was an approximation and could have been wrong from anything up to around 10% which is not very accurate at all. In conclusion I am happy with the successful investigation I have put forward and I believe I have proved my hypotheses to quite an accurate extent. Although if I were to repeat the investigation I would almost certainly have changed things like measuring limpets, I would have used more accurate means of measuring, and used a measuring device suitable for measuring the area of seaweed per quadrat. All in all it has turned out well and accurate enough to prove my hypotheses, and I am pleased with the overall outcome.
