Monday, September 3, 2018

If you plant it....they will come.

Do you remember the first week of school I had a jar on my desk with a Monarch Butterfly caterpillar in it?  Looked something like the image below.


Monarch butterflies are actually on the verge of being an endangered species.  Many different families in my neighborhood have actually planted milkweed in their gardens to help the Monarch butterflies.

This week will be your very first blog assignment.  As a science teacher, I believe that there is a lot of science out in the world that most students miss.  I will share with you articles, video clips and more.  This week I am going to have you read an editorial from the New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/03/opinion/to-save-monarch-butterfly-plant-milkweed-now.html

You will write a scholarly paragraph about what you read.  Summarize the article in at least three sentences.  Somewhere in your summary, you must make a connection to ecology.  Try and use at least three new vocabulary words in your summary.  Finally, conclude your response with your own opinion.  What do you think?  How can we save the butterflies?  Have you ever tried to help the plight of the Monarch butterflies?  Do you have milkweed in your garden?

Remember that a descent paragraph should have at least five sentences, proper punctuation, correct spelling and grammar.  I am not an English teacher, but I do know what a scientific paragraph should look like.  In addition to posting a response, I would like you to comment on at least one of your peers.  This is a public blog meaning anything that you post will be visible to the world, so put your best self out there.  I am going to share this link with your parents so they can see your work.

9 comments:

  1. Hurricane Florence is coming, and it's going to hit hard, as a state of emergency has been declared, to prevent deaths on the Virginia-South Carolina coast. This hurricane will also affect the scientists working near this region, as their equipment and their specimen/samples will be plagued by harsh gusts and/or extensive power outages. These precautions ensure that the scientific community can keep doing whatever it is their doing, while preventing a massive loss in data. Basically, this article is about what will happen to scientists studying the ocean, and why it’s affecting them. Hurricanes in the past, like Hurrican Irma, have wrecked expensive science equipment deployed to study marine life and looking at the projected strength of Florence, the scientists in the article decide to play it safe and recall most of their equipment near where the hurricane is projected to hit. I think that this article is pretty cool because it shows how a scientist’s equipment isn’t very tough, and that they needed to be cared for in order to consistently provide new information on whatever they’re studying. Also, the tools they use to study fish migrations analyzed the “speaking” patterns of the fish, to find where they would migrate, which is pretty interesting.

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  2. As the dreaded Hurricane Florence is approaching, animals of all kinds are retreating to safety. However, ironically sometimes we forget about some of the biggest mammals alive, the whales. How do they cope in such intense weather patterns? Will they pull through? These questions and many more are being answered by researchers from the Duke University Marine Lab. They have tagged multiple deep diving whales to track their unique behavior during the duration of Hurricane Florence. A high tech satellite will be monitoring their movements and reactions throughout the storm. Hopefully soon we will take another step in our understanding of these mysterious and beautiful creatures.

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  3. As the Hurricane is coming in quick many people are working hard to determine the next place it will hit. In Charolsion, South Carolina a group of workers from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)are working hard on watching the storm. There are videos from 7 beaches on the east coast and the weather experts are reporting coastal wind speed and a radar network showing the time and the direction and speed of the hurricane. They have many tools to help them learn for future hurricanes for example, they have deep sea gliders to go and take data from previous huricanes and they are mostly Federal funded.

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  4. Just days before a giant hurricane like Florence makes landfall, people scramble to get away from the coast. But the big question is, what do big ocean mammals like whales do to get away from or protect themselves from a storm like this? We aren’t that sure as of right now, but studies are being made at colleges like Duke to see what they do. Duke has tagged some deep-diving whales to see what they do, and via satellite they are tracked based on their movements.

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  5. The landfall of Hurricane Florence will not only have a huge impact on the coastal communities in its path, but can also be damaging to students doing research at the universities nearby. Being located near the coast, many students rely on the ocean for research and collecting data for projects, because of the hurricane, much will be unfortunately lost. Despite what data they no longer have, there is much to be gained from this event. New experiments such as tagging whales to see how they behave in the hurricane to how marine bacteria will react to large amounts of salt and freshwater in North Carolina’s Barrier Islands, can provide researchers with much needed information on these studies. To make certain that not all is lost, other organizations in the area are stepping in to help protect the university’s expensive research equipment to preserve it for after the destruction is over.

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  6. As hurricane Florence is nearing many people and animals scurry away from the coast. Biologists are wondering how marine animals are preparing for the storm and if they know that it is coming. Many science universities have observed marine animal patterns and tagged them to farther understand the action that they are taking to keep safe.

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  7. As hurricane Florence is coming researchers are taking small research vessels out of the water at Duke University Marine Lab in Beaufort, North Carolina. They are trying to help students who's in-water experiments could get destroyed by the incoming storm.One student had been using barriers to block animals from coming into an area of water. They were trying to find the effects that small sharks and large rays have on sea grass ecosystems , but their barriers could get destroyed by the incoming storm.The hurricane isn't just destroying research but also providing more opportunities as well. The hurricane could provide a chance to better understand whales by tracking how they behave in the middle of a hurricane. In previous years Duke researchers tagged whales and used satellites to monitor their movement. In conclusion Hurricane Florence could not only destroy but also provide more opportunities for Duke University.

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  8. The United state's mid-Atlantic seaboard is under a state of emergency as Hurricane Florence is approaching. We all know what humans do during this time of events, but what do sea animals do? Scientists are setting up experiments to see how sea animals are affected and how they react to hurricanes by doing things such as setting up trackers on whales so that they can follow where the whale are and where they go. Overall, scientists are trying new experiments during these kinds of events to discover more things about our ecosystem.

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