Friday 5-3 Free Day (River Shark)

The river sharks are five rare species of sharks that are found in rivers instead of oceans. However, people believe that there could be more species that we do not know about because the river sharks are so discrete and hidden. They are mostly round in Asia and Australia. They are usually smaller than the average shark that you would find in the ocean. River sharks can have up to as many as 9 babies at one time. They usually have a stocky grey body, tiny eyes, and broad fins. Although they are sharks, there are not very many reported shark attacks from river sharks. 

Thursday 5-2 Algae (Volvox)

Volvox is a type of algae. This type of algae forms spherical colonies. They can have as many as 50,000 cells. Volvox has a fishy odor and has daughter cells. It is not good to have a lot of volvox in the water. Over a long period of time, volvox has had many adaptations. Over a course of 35 million years, there have been 45 different species of volvoxs, depending on where they are located and what types of waters they are in. 

Wednesday 5-1 Aquarium Field Trip

1. The Orinoco crocodile is an endangered species.

2. The Dallas World Aquarium actually has around 30 Orinoco crocodiles after they were listed on the endangered species.

3. One of the tanks there has to be changed every week and it is a 4,000 gallon tank.

4. A sloth moves so slowly that its fur can actually grow algae on it.

5.  A manatee can hold its breath underwater for as long as 15 minutes.

Favorite part: I liked being able to venture off and go at your own pace with things and being able to identify everything.

Least favorite part: Having to take pictures of everything for our project.

Tuesday 4-30 Amphibians

A. There are many differences between toads and frogs. One difference is frogs need to live near water and toads do not need to live near water to survive. Frogs have a smooth slimy skin and toads have rough skin. Frogs have longer hind legs than toads do. Frogs actually jump and toads take hops or almost run. Another thing is frogs have many predators and toads almost have no predators.
B. Amphibians are considered to be a good indicator of our ecosystem because their skin is very absorbent to chemicals and other nasty things. The population of amphibians began to decline in the 1980's. Many scientist believe that they are becoming extinct because of chemicals and natural variation, global changes and diseases. A way to help this is by building habitats to protect them.

Monday 4-29 Assess a Pond

Look for dead plants and animals and algae bloom. First your going to take a water sample, then you want to examine the algae and insects in the water sample. You want to test for temperature, pH level, conductivity, nitrite, nitrate, and ammonia. Finally you want to do an organic panel.

Thursday 4-18 Watersheds

A watershed is all the water that drains somewhere like a river or a lake. A river makes up the watershed that I live in. The watershed that we live in is Elm Fork of Trinity River. The watershed address or "code" is 12030103. It is important to monitor the quality of a watershed so that if there are problems with the watershed, it can be identified before the problems become to serious. We get things such as transportation and living sources and a lot of our water resource comes from watersheds.

Wednesday 4-17 Algae Search Lab

In my group's algae search lab, we found 2 different types of insects. We found many scuds and a couple midge larva. When we put them in our tank, our fish loved them. They ate them right away. Even when we dropped the insects in the tank and they swam down to the bottom and hid in the rocks, our fish swam down there and followed them a moved the rocks and tried to dig in them to find the insects. Our fish loves these way more than they like fish food. Usually when we put fish food in the tank, they don't even ackowldge we put it in there. However, when we put the insects in there, they ate them right away.