Melanie Kile

SCI 101 Mondays

Egg Lab

The purpose of our egg lab is to see what happens to an egg when it has sat in
vinegar, water and then syrup. Will the egg be permeable to these substances or not?

First take an egg and get it’s initial weight from a food scale or what have you.
Record the weight and date. Next fill a jar or plastic container with vinegar and place
your egg inside, the vinegar should mostly cover the egg. Wait a week then remove the
egg and weigh it, take note of its appearance and size as well. Repeat these steps with
water and syrup allowing a week in between for the egg to sit.

After a week in vinegar we saw that the egg had lost its shell and swelled a bit. To
begin with the egg weighed 59.9g and now it weighed 86.4g. This tells me that the
vinegar molecules were smaller than that of the eggs outer membrane. Next we were to
see if osmosis would occur. We placed the egg in water and waited a week. The egg then
weighed 91g bringing it up from 86.4g. Osmosis did occur, the egg swelled some more
and looked translucent. Next we placed the egg in syrup and waited a week. Our weigh in
for the syrup brought us down to 36g. This tells me that the egg was hypertonic which
means the water in the egg diffused outward into the hypertonic syrup, the egg weighed
in at 36g which means the syrup was most likely a bigger molecule that the eggs surface
could not allow to pass through. Take a look at the following chart which shows the
results of four different eggs being tested.

1/31 2/3 2/7 2/10 2/14

BOB 60.8g 89.2g 85.3g 39g 41.5g

JEN 59.9g 86.4g 91g 36g 31.8g
HUMPTY 59.9g 89.5g 95g 43g 41.3g
SALLY FIELD 55.7g 80.8g 82.5g 32.2g 35.6g
(raw) (vinegar) (water) (syrup) (last reading)

When performing this lab I was unsure of many things. I knew the acids in the
vinegar would eat away the eggs shell but I didn’t expect the egg to receive the vinegar as
much as it did. Nor did I expect the egg to allow even more water to diffuse into. When
the egg was placed in syrup though, I predicted that the egg would shrivel through
osmosis, which it did.

This was a great lab to demonstrate osmosis as well as hypertonic and hypotonic
situations. Vinegar, water and syrup are great liquids to use to demonstrate this and I
think it would be interesting to see how other liquids effect the egg. This lab gave me a
clearer understanding of how osmosis and hypotonic and hypertonic situations work.