Question

the drop you have on your slide is about 0.1mL from a 100mL sample collected from scraping a 15cm2 patch of a floating dock. Let’s say there are 300 diatoms on your slide which would be 300 per 0.1mL. Since there 1000 subsamples in a 100mL sample, that would total 300,000 diatoms in wach 1cm2 patch. Within Oceanside Harbor there are 1000 boat slips. Each boat slip is surrounded by about 40,000,000cm2 of floating dock. Please estimate how mant diatoms are on the docks of Oceanside Harbor

Answer 1

Given that 300000 diatoms are present in 15cm2 patch of the floating deck.

Number of diatoms in the 40000000cm2 floating deck =

number of diatoms in 1 cm2 * 40 000 000 = 40000000 * 300000 / 15 = 8,00,00,00,00,000 or 8*1011 diatoms.

So number of diatoms in one boat slips is 8*1011 diatoms.

Given that there are 1000 boat slips. So the total number of diatoms in 1000 boat slips = 8*1011 *1000 = 8*1014 diatoms.

Hence answer is 8*1014 diatoms.

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