Friday, April 29, 2016

My Inner Fish

The primary topic of this video series, My Inner Fish, was evolution. The evolution in this video series specialized in fish to reptile to mammal to human. We learned about evolution and Earth's timeline in previous units, but from a much broader perspective and not as much focus on the evolution of humans. We also learned in the video about the evolution of certain human traits, which we did not do as much in different units.
"Why are mass extinctions important?"
Mass extinctions are important because so many organisms disappear from the face of the Earth forever, drastically changing the Earth's present and future. Also, because mass extinctions destroy so many large organisms, it gives opportunity to smaller organisms to grow and possibly evolve more. A question I have is "Did more large organisms die off in mass extinctions than small organisms?"
"What event needed to take place for the mammals to emerge and truly flourish?"
The extinction of the dinosaurs needed to take place. With the dinosaurs gone, mammals had less predators and more room to grow and expand throughout the area. A question I have is "how did reptiles do once the dinosaurs passed?
"Image result for mass extinction
science.nationalgeographic.com

Monday, April 18, 2016

Nearing the End

I am almost at the end of my 20 Time project. Today in class, I planned out what information I would need to have and maybe even finalize for the Ted Talk presentation. The next step is to finalize all the information and possibly take pictures of the items I used to make the bioplastics and maybe even the bioplastics themselves.
Making the bioplastics was easier than I thought it would be, and it took about an hour to solidify.

Friday, April 15, 2016

Cnidaria

Sea nettle (Chrysaora fuscescens) 2.jpgSea nettles.jpg

Pictured above are Pacific sea nettles, or Crysaora fuscescens. These come from the phylum Cnidaria. Cnidaria comes from the domain Eukaryota and the kingdom Animalia. The bell of the sea nettle can grow larger than one meter, or three feet, in diameter, but most are less than 50 centimeters across. They have 24 undulating maroon tentacles that can drag behind the Pacific sea nettle as far as 15 feet. It has a sting, but it is rarely dangerous. Its tentacles are used for protection and to kill its food. As this organism drifts throughout the ocean, it captures its prey in its tentacles, killing it with the toxins released, or its "stings," and moves the prey up to its mouth as it begins digestion.
The Pacific sea nettles are capable of asexual production in its polyp stage, and sexual reproduction in its medusa stage. It's Latin name Chrysaora comes from the Greek mythological Chrysaor, brother of Pegasus and son of Medusa and Poseidon. Chrysaor translated means "he who has a golend armament." 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrysaora_fuscescens

Monday, April 11, 2016

Geologic Timeline

Three major events in Earth's history are when the dinosaurs went extinct, mammals went into existence, and Earth's temperature settled. The scale of Earth's history is long and shows the change in Earth in almost every way possible, from the organisms to the amount of water on Earth to the temperature on Earth. I was really surprised that we were able to learn and know about all of this. On our time on Earth, we probably impacted the temperature the most, raising it incredibly. My only question is why did Earth change in temperature. Image result for geologic time scale
en.wikapedia.org