Catching up in Environmental Science
Since my last post we have covered the following topics in Environmental Science:
Evolution and Natural Selection
Primary and Secondary Succession, with special emphasis given to successional changes on Mount St. Helens
Symbiosis and Coevolution: mutualism, commensalism, parasitism (Watched a great video called “Living Together”–fantastic, a classic)
Predation: how to avoid predation and how to be a predator
Ecological Niche: Fundamental vs. Realized
Limiting Resources
Keystone species such as fig trees and top predators
Species Richness
The boys took a quiz on this material and we set up our Winogradsky Columns for our bacterial study. That seems to be going well. They are taking water quality tests each week and photographing the changes seen in each column. We will follow for the next five weeks.
Then, last week we tackled Biomes, both terrestrial and aquatic. The boys had to create tables to compare the climate, productivity, species type, limiting factors etc. for each terrestrial biome. I went over freshwater and salt water systems in class. They also had a quiz at the end of the week, which they thought was very hard. I have no finished grading it yet.
This week we are moving into Population Dynamics and Ecology (one of my favorite topics actually). We are going over:
Population density
Growth rate calculations
Environmental Resistance and Carrying Capacity
Log curves vs. exponential growth curves
Reproductive strategies: r-selected species vs. K-selected species
Survivorship curves
Density dependent vs. independent limiting factors
Predator-Prey relationships
Boom or Bust relationships
Thomas Malthus and predicting human population growth and carrying capacity
Demographics
Age structure diagrams of developed, developing and underdeveloped countries
Good stuff! They have calculations to do tomorrow and in our double period we are going to work on exponential growth and they will research Thomas Malthus’ ideas. I also have a lab for growing radishes to illustrate competition of resources, but that will have to wait until next week as they did not include enough radish seeds. It is always something.