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.

Urban Jungle = Punctuated Equilibrium

This week in National Geographic, there is a cool book review of Darwin Comes to Town by evolutionary biologist, Menno Schilthuizen.  Please let me know right away if you can't see this article, because it totally relates to what we are talking about in class. 

In the interview with the author, Schilthuizen talks about how cities are driving evolutionary change.  For your final blog post of the year, you will read the interview.  After you read the interview, you will write a scholarly paragraph about punctuated equilibrium.  In your paragraph you will explain how extreme urban environments are speeding up evolution.  You need to give at least two examples from the interview.  If you look up other reviews of this book, there are a ton of examples out there.  Please explain how cities are causing these organisms to evolve more quickly than the millions of years Darwin suggested with his theory of Natural Selection. 

National Geographic Book Talk:
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/05/urban-living-drives-evolution-in-surprising-way/?beta=true

Financial Times:
https://www.ft.com/content/64422438-0833-11e8-9650-9c0ad2d7c5b5

HIREC:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3352552/


After you have written your response, please comment on at least one other person's post.