Introduction Microorganisms are all around us and we interact with them all the time every day. Everyday microorganisms spread or grow. Contaminants such as bacteria and fungi are ubiquitous, meaning they exist everywhere, and they are able to spread or grow as well. Epidemiology is the study of how, when, where, what, and who are involved in the spread and distribution of diseases. The experiment presented was designed to study the epidemic of microorganisms in or on an object of our everyday life. The fish tank in the biology lab is a piece of equipment that houses an environment inside an environment, thus it changes constantly and deals with infinite microorganisms. My group of amateur scientists predicted that there is more bacteria living and spreading in the inside of the tank than the outside of the tank due to its environment it houses inside. The goal of the experiment is to prove using samples from cotton swabs inside and outside the tank and observing those 3 days in algar plates after how there is more colonies of bacteria inside than outside. Materials and Methods Materials we used to execute the experiment were a fish tank, 4 cottons swabs or q-tips, and 4 agar plates to contain the samples from the cotton swabs. The first step in the procedure was to find the naturally contaminated fish tank in our everyday environment. Next you acquire 4 cotton swabs or samples inside and outside the fish tank environment using q- tips. This is done by wiping 2 q- tips on the glass not underwater inside the tank, and 2 q- tips wiped on the glass outside the tank. Each swab is then wiped onto the bottom of its own agar plate then closed and untouched for 3 days. After 3 days you check the agar plates for how its contaminants have spread or grown. Results

In our first cotton swab on the inside we found 100 colonies of bacteria scattered all over the agar plate. The second inside swab had 25 colonies of bacteria in the middle of the plate. On the outside, the first plate had 3 or 4 colonies of bacteria and 7 colonies of fungi. The second plate on the outside had 2 colonies of bacteria and no fungi. There was a lot of bacteria inside the tank with 1 sample showing wide spread of colonies. The outside swabs had significantly lower colonies of bacteria but had 1 sample that contained multiple colonies of fungi. The results show that the inside did indeed have more bacteria than the outside and the bacteria did spread at least a little. Surprisingly the outside had a few colonies of fungi that were not predicted. Discussion The results mean that more colonies of bacteria and microorganisms exist in the inside opposed to the outside of the fish tank. Our hypothesis was supported that the inside had more contaminants. What went wrong was that not both the agar plates for the inside of the fish tank showed spread of the bacteria and that one of the outside samples contained a reasonable amount of fungi while the other one had none. What went right was that the results for bacteria inside and outside were consistent. Both the inside plates had significantly more colonies of bacteria than the outside. Possible problems or errors could be the handling of the swabs and agar plates. Since one of the agar plates had fungi and none of the others did may suggest that one of the agar plates could have caught an outside microorganism from the experiment of a cotton swab may have touched the water of the fish tank or caught an outside microorganism. Another error could have been where the cotton swabs were wiped. They could have been wiped somewhere off the glass on the tank.