I regret to inform you that my science experiment didn’t go to plan. At all.
I’m not entirely sure what happened. But of all the petri dishes I swabbed, the only dish to show any growth was the control (which should have shown the least) and it had three small dots of bacteria. All the other plates were completely blank.
Unfortunately, the last time I did a science experiment, I was in grade school. That was a few years ago. More than 20, if you really want to be precise. The odds I did something I’m not even aware of that screwed up the experiment are extremely high.
Not to mention I got these dishes from Amazon for a few bucks. There’s a good chance the dishes weren’t superior quality to begin with. Plenty reviews indicted this might be the case.
All in all, it was a great time though. I really enjoyed conducting the experiment. I was able to wrangle our friend Beth, who is a legit scientist, to help me brainstorm and check some of my work. It’s always great to chat with her.
I emailed my professor to inform her that since it took me one day to do the experiment and then I had to wait five days for results, as indicated by the instructions included with the dishes, I had now spent six days on this effort and didn’t have another six days to do it over again before the paper was due. The instructor told me to think about what could have gone wrong, and discuss lessons learned, instead of analysing what would have been the results of my experiment.
After making sure my paper hit all of the criteria required for the assignment I read it over one more time and then turned it in at 4am. Because my body just decides now that wake up time is 4am. Thanks, body. Anyway, I am super proud of my paper and I hope it makes the grade.
Although I missed out on bacteria colony glory, I did definitely learn a lot. But I will always dream of the complex bacteria society that could have been….
