The effect of salinity on the head movements of Caenorhabditis elegans

Abstract

The movement of N2 wild-type strain of Caenorhabditis elegans was studied at different salinity concentrations to see if there was a relationship between salinity and movement. We immersed C. elegans in 3 different NaCl concentrations (5.86 g/L, 9.93 g/L and 14.0 g/L) with 10 replicates each. We recorded the number of times the C. elegans changed their head directions for 60 seconds using a DinoXcope. We found that the number of head turns decreased with an increase in salinity. The maximum number of head turns was 196.3 ± 24.4 at 5.86 g/L NaCl, followed by 170.3 ± 29.6 at 9.98 g/L NaCl and 124.0 ± 22.4 at 14.0 g/L NaCl. After doing a t-test, we found that there was a significant difference between two treatments; 5.86g/L and 14.0g/L, thus leading us to reject our null hypothesis.  We concluded that the number of head movements of C. elegans decreases as the concentration of NaCl increases.