In this activity, students will explore how fertilization behavior and current flow influence the dispersal of sponge larvae.
This lesson delves into the fascinating process and products of sexual selection: the process by which traits become more or less common depending on an individual's ability to mate with more or better partners. Understanding sexual selection allows a deeper understanding of natural selection and evolution.
Students study a variety of gastropod shells and consider how they provide evidence of coevolution.
In this archived webinar, conservation biologist Joe Kolowski leads us into the Peruvian Amazon, a rich, fertile, and essential part of our planet. He shows how the technique of ?camera trapping? helps scientists to understand the creatures that move about the jungle?particularly mammals that may be endangered by oil exploration. Kolowski is working with other scientists to develop a conservation initiative for the area. They are incorporating biodiversity principles and new scientific research in an attempt to minimize the negative effects of oil exploration and development in this area.
Students first examine the bodies and behavior of live slugs or snails, then use water balloons to model their unique style of locomotion, and finally tackle a series of analytical questions designed to cultivate a grasp of divergent evolution.
Students explore how finches discriminate between members of their own species and those of a closely related species based on song and appearance.
This video illustrates the evolutionary process of speciation.
This resource is a part of the Spineless-YES...Helpless-No! lesson plan. This resource includes links to student resources for the lesson.
Students will define ecological forecasting, and be able to describe three examples of this process. Students will explain how the life cycle and ecological preferences of sea nettles help make them unusually abundant in the Chesapeake Bay and describe the economic and ecological impacts associated with large numbers of sea nettles in the Chesapeake Bay, and how ecological forecasting may help reduce these impacts. They will also define "limiting factors," explain how physical factors can be used to forecast sea nettle "outbreaks," and describe the limitations of these forecasts.
Students will view videos of animal actions and behaviors and consider these actions in terms of their consequences for the animal, such as its well-being, survival and reproductive success, and also in terms of how they come to happen - are they instinctive and automatic actions or learned and deliberate? Students will also complete an observation of a real animal.
This brief video lesson describes the miraculous journey of infant sea turtles as these tiny animals run the gauntlet of predators and harsh conditions. Then, in numbers, see how human behavior has made their tough lives even more challenging. Discussion/assessment questions and suggested supplemental resources are also included.
This resource explores the biology of the symbiotic relationship between the Hawaiian Bobtail squid and bioluminescent bacteria Vibrio fischeri.
Students analyze videos to make observations about species, populations, and communities of organisms and discuss their symbiotic relationships. Then they create a hypothetical marine ecosystem and describe the adaptive, trophic, and symbiotic relationships between the biotic and abiotic components of the ecosystem.
This resource is a simulation that models the way fish and other organisms live in nature. Students will learn about the relationships between many different aspects of fish life: genes, traits, variation, survival and reproduction.
We can test if a behavior is inherited or learned by taking some individuals born into one enviornment and raising them in a different environment and seeing what traits change and which ones stay the same.
How scientists determine learned vs inherited behavior will be discussed.
In this high school unit on ecosystems, students investigate the case of the rapid increase and decline of the buffalo population in the Serengeti. It motivates students to ask questions and develop initial hypotheses for what could have changed in the ecosystem to create such drastic population changes. Students analyze data from many populations of organisms in the Serengeti to figure out how disease eradication in the 1960s led to the major changes we see in the Serengeti today. In Bend 2, students evaluate the claim that trees store carbon and can reduce the impact of climate change. Students figure out how photosynthesis and cellular respiration are key mechanisms to explaining the role of trees in climate mitigation. Finally, students explore and compare climate change mitigation solutions.
Students will compare and contrast three types of symbiotic relationships, describe the relationship between zooanthellae and coral, and explain the effects of nitrogen-fixing bacteria on their symbiotic partners.
With this interactive, based on the Wall of Birds mural, students explore species from all surviving bird families alongside a select group of extinct ancestors. Students can make comparisons of anatomy, native ranges, and distinctive voices.
This video shows seals migrating by seasons. This also highlights the decline in their species due to human activity.