Desert Microbe STEM Challenge

After highlighting the importance of adaptations in general, you can focus in on the special ways that desert plants and animals have adapted to extremes of heat and dryness by using both physical and behavioral mechanisms.   In particular, their ability to store and conserve water is quite impressive.  Water can be stored by animals in fatty deposits in their tails and other tissues.  In plants, water can be stored in the roots, stems, and/or leaves of plants.  These organisms are also adapted to minimize water loss and from out of the skin, from urine and feces, and even from breathing.

​In this STEM Challenge, your job is to calculate how much water a newly discovered desert microbe can ingest. As part of this challenge, you will also have to decide when the microbe has become saturated and can no longer ingest  additional water.