I think with additional testing we could better determine why the cuttlefish ink lost its effectiveness over time. It’s possible that the cuttlefish ink lost its effectiveness because the extract had too low of a percentage of cuttlefish ink and needed a higher concentration of the ink to be effective for a longer period of time. Other than that I’m not sure and additional testing would need to be done.
We combined the cuttlefish ink with ethanol to create the extract because of the natural pigment of cuttlefish ink which is black and opaque so in order to be able to accurately measure absorbances we had to create an extract with ethanol. We chose ethanol because it is a polar solvent that can easily dissolve the ink. There are other solvents that we could have used like DMSO for example.
Do you think a possible reason that your results were inconclusive is because of the vastly different environments of a cuttlefish in the ocean and an agar plate in open air?
I hadn’t thought of that but that could certainly have contributed to why our results were inconclusive. Maybe additional testing in the future could address that and attempt to accommodate for the different environments of cuttlefish in the ocean.
Is there potentially another reason why the cuddle fish ink lost its effectiveness over time?
I think with additional testing we could better determine why the cuttlefish ink lost its effectiveness over time. It’s possible that the cuttlefish ink lost its effectiveness because the extract had too low of a percentage of cuttlefish ink and needed a higher concentration of the ink to be effective for a longer period of time. Other than that I’m not sure and additional testing would need to be done.
Why did you combine the extract with ethanol?
We combined the cuttlefish ink with ethanol to create the extract because of the natural pigment of cuttlefish ink which is black and opaque so in order to be able to accurately measure absorbances we had to create an extract with ethanol. We chose ethanol because it is a polar solvent that can easily dissolve the ink. There are other solvents that we could have used like DMSO for example.
Do you think a possible reason that your results were inconclusive is because of the vastly different environments of a cuttlefish in the ocean and an agar plate in open air?
I hadn’t thought of that but that could certainly have contributed to why our results were inconclusive. Maybe additional testing in the future could address that and attempt to accommodate for the different environments of cuttlefish in the ocean.