Tide Pools

in this lab we found, counted, identified, and recorded the diferent animals in the tide pool. we would encounter animals that fall in to one of these nine phylum: porifera, cnidarians, plathelminthes, nematoda, mollusks, annelids, arthropods, echinoderms. we unreeled and layed down 20 meters of our transect line in a random area of the tide pool, then placed the quadrat at 0, 5, 10, 15, and 20 meters and counted, identified, and recorded the animals in to their correct phylum.
our research question was: which phyla most present in divercity and sheer amount in the south maui tide pool? I thought that molluskc would be the modst plentifull while cnidarians would be the most diverse. I was only half wrong, mollusks were the most plentiful but arthropoda was the most diverse. some sources of error weresplashing around and scaring away some of the creatures, not getting an exact count from not diging around in the muck and finding all of the animals.
I had lots of scientific fun during this lab especialy in the field. my team worked verry eficently together in the field. I love science so its hard for me to pick my favorite part but i would have to say that in this lab it was being in the water and colecting the data itself. I gained the skill of identifying animals and placing them in their phylum.

gps

hi mr.M my group did take actual pictures. We also took a video but it wouldnt upload to my blog and i remembered that i could use my flash drive after the class was over.
this is what our gps devices look like


this is a pic of the second geocache we found

this is inside the first geocache

this is a picture of the first geocache we found

Geocache

Geocaching is really cool and fun. there are tons of geocaches world wide and everyone can play all you need is a GPS device. You can find coordinates of all the geocaches at http://www.geocaching.com/ using that website and this one http://www.trimble.com/gps/whygps.shtml you can learn all you need to know about gps and geocaching. when in doubt, google it.

Before this unit I didn't have a clue of how to use a gps system at all even how to turn it on. I am now the group expert, I am completely gps literate.

The first time we went out on a geocache hunt someone had taken the cache so it wasn't there. When we went out for the tournament though we found two caches and were a bush away from the third. We did rather good but both groups in fourth period got all three. ohwell our group rocked!

termite observation

1. 120g of silica sand
19ml water
douglas furr wood
about 30 termites
(8/17)observation: slugish activity and eating the wood

2. (8/23) observations: litle of visible wood been eaten. surface sand displaced from diging tunels. manny tunels visable at botom of jar.

3. (8/30) observation: Wood- been eaten a little. Water- less of it. Sand- moved around. Termites- apears to be less, posibly in tunels that are not visable.

4. (9/9) observation: someone nocked over the jar, many tunels were colapsed some colapses traped termites. he remaning termited just started rebuilding the tunels.

5. I found the termite unit interesting but repetitive, i took notes at every opertunity  wich was helpfull but I did end up with repeated information wich was useless. my favorite part was that of the disecting and microscope. my least favorite part was that of the repeated notes.

6. i do not have anyhting else of interest about our termite enemys.

termite lab

Helo mr.marggraf :) this is the rest of the stuff you wanted me to post.

Symbiotic relationship: dissimilar organisms in a mutualy benificial relationship.
Here we are talking about termites and protozoa. Protozoa get a place to live and food to eat, the protozoa brake down the cellulose from wood and turn it in to acetate, carbon dioxide, hydrogen, and methane.
Termites get acetate, this is termites source of energy.

Our lab was pretty simple, first mr.marggraf gave us our termite, then we pulled its guts out. we placed the guts in a drop of saline solution on our microscope slide, then smooshed them a bit and looked at them (the guts).

my personal reflection: see previous posts :) (the most recent video)

This is the last video from the lab. It was really funny because aspen and jimmy tried to pull the just out of the termite and they just pulled it in half then we got a new termite and i tried and i even have the shakes but i still did it way better then them, haha.

This is the second video from that day in class.

This video is from when my group in class disected a termite so we could look at its guts under a microscope, there are three videos that we took during this , this is just one.

transect tape for shizle

yo! aieght
the transect tape is like a giant measuring tape used for measurin and sampling objects and their distrabution.
1. pull silver loop
2. place ends of tape on either side of object you are measuring
3. record data
4. retract transect tape by rotating black handle counter clockwise