STEM Biology/Biotech

Homeostasis Lab
By: Suyash Krishan, Rohan Ayyar, Kevin Meneses,
and Gordy Brodeur

Introduction

Our lab was about how breathing helps maintain homeostasis.

What organ does it have to do with?-L ungs
How is it controlled?-no hormones just an electrical signal
How does it work?-T he sensors in the blood vessels signal that there is too much CO2 so the
brain increases breathing to get the CO2 out of its system.

Purpose/Objective

The purpose was to see how breathing maintains homeostasis.

Procedure

1. First we measured basic resting breath rate by counting the breaths we take in 30 secs..
2. Made 2 people run, one person ran 1 lap the other ran 2 laps.
3. After we measured their breath rate after the running by counting the breaths they take in 30 secs.
4. Then we timed how long it took to recover and catch our breath.
5. We repeated the process 2 more times.

Materials

Stopwatch/cellular phone
Notebook
2 Runners
A 400 meter long track (maximum)
Pencil

Data

Shows amounts of breaths after the run and shows recovery time

Here is the graph for the 1st and 2nd lap.

Figure 1

Analysis

If you look at the data listed above, you will notice that the recovery times are fairly similar for each day
(Within two minutes of each other) with Day 1 being the closest of 5 seconds apart. However, because
Kevin ran two laps he took almost twice as many breaths for each day. This shows the more you do any
physical activity, the more breaths you have at the end. It also shows Kevin has to breathe twice as much
to match Suyash in recovery time. The only error in our data was that the sometimes the runners would
accidently control their breathe then feeling it normally.

Summary

All this data was accumulated in the course of 3 days. The only major difficulty we faced was having
different weather because your breath rate can go higher if its cold. The idea of our lab was born from
having the sense that our resting breath rate is less than after we do some sort of physical activity
depending on the intensity of the activity.

Resources
https://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health/health-topics/topics/hlw/controls
https://www.unm.edu/~lkravitz/Article%20folder/Breathing.html