72hours later...

After our kit arrived a week late, (which we cannot really complain, seeing as it cost $80 we did not pay for), we were really excited to actually get our hands dirty and get some results on the coliform levels in pedder bay, off Pearson College docks.

Therefore, friday afternoon, Brandi and I went down to the docks, got a 4ml sample of water and poured it into the bottle with the gel-like content and shook as it told us to. Jonathan kindly helped us to set the incubator to the right temperature, 35degrees Celsius. After waiting an hour or so for the incubator to reach the right temperatures, we finally put in our gel-full petri-dish that we were to leave for the recommended 36-48 hours.

And wait we did, with the occasional peep to ensure all was going well. We did realize that no colour coded coliform spots were appearing on the gel..but we assumed that all was going well.

72 hours later..the gel still looks the same as it did when we put it in.

Disappointing?? YES

Did we learn a lot? MORE THAN WE EXPECTED

Our experiment might have failed ( maybe due to our own error, or the malfunction of the kit itself - we are sure we followed every instruction to detail) but we gained knowledge..a lot of it.

Starting from what coliform is - especially for those of us who had never had of it before, or never really understood what the fuss was about - to actually almost being able to measure the levels of coliform in our immediate environments!

So 72 hours later...the gel-full petri dish still sits in the incubator - maybe we are still hoping that something will happen - the knowledge about coliform that we have acquired is tremendous, and the friendships we have strengthened will last now even longer!

Charity