Category: Science Education

Biology Lab: Sponges, Jellies, Flatworms & Molluscs

- Wendy St. John Leave a comment

We did a super cool lab this week – and a relatively photogenic one, at that – so I thought I’d post a few photos! We had a bunch of live specimens (mostly marine inverts from Bodega Bay), and we did our first dissection of the semester – a squid. SUPER COOL!

Here’s a planaria, a type of flatworm (phylum Platyhelminthes). SO CUTE!

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Fairfield Osborn Kelly Pond

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Field trip to the Fairfield Osborn Preserve, with A Watershed Year freshman experience class. I hiked up to Kelly Pond with a group of students so they could collect field data for a research project. It’s quite a hike up to the pond, which is near the northern end of the preserve. Covered with Azolla, the pond is a peaceful and lovely place to visit. 

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Who’s Awake? Me . . . too . . .

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I have a little great horned owl buddy who’s been calling most nights for the past few weeks close enough to my bedroom window that I can hear her* while I’m in bed. Usually, she calls really late at night/early morning (between 2 and 4 a.m.). But last night, I didn’t hear her at all, and it made me a little bit lonely.

But tonight, she’s out there calling already. At 6:30 p.m. Oh yeah.

I’m tempted to go out and try to find her, which I might be able to do by calling back to her. (I’ve never called down a great horned owl, but I’ve called down barred owls before, so probably it’s possible). BUT if she’s defining her territory or something like that, I don’t want to mess with her. So, maybe I’ll just sit her and enjoy the serenade. 🙂

I might at least take a peek in the trees out back when I go out for dinner (if I can convince my sonGr to rouse himself from the couch long enough to walk over to the Mexican restaurant up the street). 😀

*Guessing at the sex by the pitch of the call; I could be wrong about that, though. Also, the title of this post refers to the phrase many birders use to recognize the call of the great horned owl. It sounds a lot like, “Who’s awake? Me . . . too . . .”  (You can listen to it here; I like the “Territorial Hooting Duet” the best.

Best Joke Ever!

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Today’s diversity biology lab was AWESOME! I knew it would be fun – we looked at Echinoderms, which are just super cool, and we had a bunch of live starfish and sea urchins for them to examine under the scopes. So, that part was expectedly great – we fed the urchins bits of nori and watched them eat, and we looked at the starfishes’ tube feet, and some of the students took selfies with the critters. Very cool.

Then, when we were wrapping up to go back to the classroom (the tanks with the live creatures are in a different room), something totally amazing happened: one of the rock crabs decided to eat an urchin, while we were watching. I really didn’t expect this – the urchins and crabs have been living in that tank together for weeks now, and I hadn’t seen any sign of predation (well, not by the crabs; one of the starfish ate a chiton on Tuesday). I guess the rock crab was hungry. 😀

We watched while the crab grabbed the urchin and began to dismantle it with it’s two large claws. It literally cut the urchin apart, and scooped out its innards and stuffed them into its mouth. We could hear the endoskeleton crack, and there were guts floating around in the water. I’m honestly not even sure at what point the urchin stopped being alive – throughout all of this, its tube feet kept moving around, as though it were trying to escape. That part was a bit sad, but it was a good example of nature in action.

This was one of the most interesting thing I’ve seen on campus in all the years I’ve been at this school. It was really, really cool to watch, and my students were SO EXCITED!

That’s still not the end of the story, though . . .

You know how once in a while, there is a moment when you see a golden opportunity, and you take it? And it creates a rare moment of such great beauty, it’s like the sun coming out from behind the clouds on a rainy day? Today, I had one of those moments.

As we were watching the rock crab devour the urchin, someone asked about the other crab in the tank – a kelp crab – whether or not it might try and fight the rock crab for part of the urchin.

Using my best, most serious teacher voice, I said, “Do you know why the rock crab isn’t sharing its kill with the kelp crab?”

My students turned to me with expectant faces, waiting for me to drop some science knowledge on them. A few of them threw out guesses: “Because it’s a different species?” ~ “The rock crab is territorial?” ~ “Because the kelp crab doesn’t like to eat urchins?”

And I said:

“No. It’s because the rock crab is shellfish.“

*drops the mic*

AND THEY LAUGHED! THEY LAUGHED REALLY HARD! GENUINE LAUGHTER!

This was almost certainly the most sublime joke-telling moment in my whole life. Never again could that joke be so perfect, so appropriate, so hilarious. THEY LAUGHED and I did a victory dance, and it was so amazing.

So, yeah. Lab today was awesome.

 

 

Spatial Analysis in Macroecology

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It’s my turn to teach a lesson next week for the stats class I’m taking this semester (everyone has to do one; my topic is analyzing spatial data). This class was supposed to focus on SAS, but so far we’ve done almost nothing in SAS (which is fine with me since I don’t really care that much about learning SAS at this moment; I think JMP will be fine for most of my thesis needs). Especially since it looks like next week I might not do anything with SAS at all; instead, my professor wants me to play around with a program called SAM (Spatial Analysis in Macroecology), so I did a bit of that this evening.

And so far it looks pretty cool! I think I might be able to do some of the things I planned to do in ArcGIS in SAM instead, and a bit more easily. We shall see. It took me all evening to import a data set (for a really stupid reason I should have caught a lot sooner, but OH WELL :D. I thought it was a Mac to PC problem, and part of it was, but mostly it was that I had a numeric value in one of my column labels and apparently the program hates that).

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ANYHOODLE there they are. Those are ALL the nests we’ve found for this particular population of turtles in six years of field research. (Including viable nests, nest attempts, and predated nests). This isn’t the data set I’ll use for the meat of my analysis; I’m just going to use these to calculate a mean nest distance value for this population. But this was a good place to start with SAM, I think. Tomorrow, I’ll play around with this a bit more and see what cool stuff I can do. For now though, I like it. And I guess I can put together some sort of presentation about it, assuming this is what my professor decides he wants me to teach. Even if he ends up having me do stuff in JMP (or even SAS), it’s okay – I’m glad to be having the opportunity to learn a bit about SAM. I think it might be really useful to me down the road.

A Nice Thing Happened Today . . .

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Another nice thing happened at school today when I ran into one of my former students. When he was in my class, he’d asked me to write a letter of recommendation for him, to accompany his application for a reasonably prestigious scholarship. I was more than happy to do so; he is an excellent student and an all around lovely person. Well, he GOT the scholarship, and the Chancellor of the university told him that the letter I wrote him was crucial in the decision they made to award him the scholarship. It was a really good feeling to know I legit helped something good happen for this young man. Also, he gave me a hug. I love getting hugs from former students. It just makes me happy.

Today Was One of Those Days

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So, sometimes I realize that I just really enjoy teaching. Today was one of those days. It was an easy lab, from the teaching standpoint. They worked in small groups to discuss questions from readings about influenza and prion diseases; mostly, all I had to do was wander around and answer questions and clarify things and make sure they were on the right track in finding the answers. But of course, sometimes I just pull up a chair and jump into their discussions, and it’s just SO COOL. There is some amazing knowledge in their brains, and it’s wonderful to hear them make connections and add new information to the discussions. (Like the guy who told us the whole lifecycle of toxoplasmosis, and you could just tell he thought it was SUPER COOL). And they decided that prions are basically zombie brain cells, which is scarily accurate, really.

I did lecture a bit, about influenza pandemics, and the thing that was REALLY COOL is that when I tried to get their attention, and they didn’t quiet down right away, my usual technique is to just stop talking (instead of trying to shout over them; as long as a couple of people realize I want the class’ attention, eventually they’ll get the hint and shush the others). But tonight, when I stopped talking? They totally got the hint right away, and I had silence in, like, three seconds. THIS IS FABULOUS. It feels like a sign of respect, and I am grateful for that. And they seemed interested in the discussion and AHHHH it was just really cool.

And someone made an appointment to come see me today about some stuff she missed, and that was lovely (I’m one of the freaks who LOVES it when students come to my office hours. YES THAT IS WHY I AM HERE! LET ME HELP YOU)! So, yeah. It was a good day.