BS Biology seniors study effects of oil spill in quails

By Monna Senara

  

A group of senior biology majors found out that fumes in oil spill do not affect the development of quails.

Milagros Pocong, Mia Salvosa, Cyrus Georsua, and Hacie de Erio teamed up in this special project as part of their Developmental Biology course.

The results showed that the development of the eggs from the control and experimental groups were similar.

“My hypothesis is oil spill is insignificant in the development of the Japanese quail egg because Japanese quail has factors that can protect from toxic fumes and I think it works” said Georsua.

Georsua said they are going to look for articles that will justify the result they obtained.

The project aimed to examine the abnormalities in the growth of the quail embryo if exposed to oil spill.

“We’ve known that crude oil has harmful effects in seawater creatures but birds are aerial. We’ll test if oil spill has effects to birds, which are not directly affected like the sea creatures,” said Pocong.

The researchers created two-set ups that mimic the site near the sea with a humidifier that uses sea water.

The experimental group is exposed to oil spill sediments that exude fumes while the control group is exposed to sediments without oil.

The set-ups have 35 quail eggs each, which were incubated and observed daily.

“Our representative animal is the quail because it is easily available. Development takes only 17 days compared to chick which is 21 days,” said Pocong.

The group started the observation period last September 21 and finished on October 8. They said they faced many challenges as they worked on their research.

“[It’s a challenge] to get the right number of eggs at a specific stage. When we get the egg we don’t know if it has later or earlier developmental stage compared to another egg. But we can’t do anything about it,” said Georsua.

“Sometimes the egg is not hundred percent fertilized, no embryo. But we have mechanism to cope up with that problem. We open three eggs a day so we can have something to observe,” adds Pocong.

Lack of equipment posed another difficulty in their experiment.

“There is no automatic turner for the egg. We just do the turning of the egg ourselves. If we don’t turn it, the embryo will stick to one side and might cause abnormality,” said Georsua.

Prof. Judith Silapan, their instructor in Developmental Biology, said that in the special project the students try to assess potential risk to organisms by subjecting the organisms to different factors that may enhance or retard their development. Aside from this, another objective of the project is to optimize the students’ procedure.

“I would like to see at the end of the activities they would be able to acquire the skills in conducting a science inquiry and for them to appreciate the activity itself, the learning process,” said Silapan.