Last Week Recap!

OK well first off i would like to say that i have had a great time here in the marine biology class. Mr. Welton has really made it fun for me and i hope that he does this another year in the future so other kids can experience this class. Throughout the year we have been on field trips like going to Omaha which was one of the funnest fieldtrips i have ever been on, and also we went to Mr. Weltons brothers pet shop which was also really fun. We stopped at 7-eleven on the way there and i got a soda, hotdog, and a pack of beef jerky for breakfast! Wow was that deleicious. Anyway, over the many dayas of this class i have learned about all types of different creatures and cells likes things. I think that if Mr. Welton wasnt teaching this class then i would have had a horrible times because he is the best teacher in the Hyman Brand Hebrew Academy!

Chapter 9 Review

When i got this packet, I thought to myself this is huge and its going to suck, but I was reading it and i actually found a lot of things interesting. I found out that vertebrates enter our world approximatley 350 million years ago and this event changedlife on earth forever. Land vertebrates are the descendents of bony fishes and had to adapt to the harsh conditions ashore. If you live on land then that means you have to breath air and the descendants had lungs which allow absorption of oxygen directly from air. I also learned that there are around 7,000 living species of reptiles, including lizards, sankes, turtles, and crocodiles. Their dry skin is covered with scales to prevent water loss and to prevent them from drying out. This ferature also allows the animal to lay eggs on land. Like most fishes, reptiles are cold blooded and they get very sluggish in cold temperatures. This feature tends to keep them out of the cold regions especially on land because the air temperature is colder then the ocean temperature. Last but not least i would like to talk about sea turtles. They belong to an ancient group of reptiles. They have an armored shell that is attached to their backbone, therefore if you take it off they would die. Also unlike land turtles, they can not retract their head into their shell and their legs are bigger then land turtles because it helps them swim. Overall this packet was pretty interesting.

Week work and presentation

This week has probably been the hardest week for me in this class so far. We had to work on our super long powerpoint presentations that were on articles that we had to find on GoogleScholar. At first I tried to look for articles about jellyfish and then albino dolphins but all of those articles were super hard and way too confusing for me to understand. I even tried to have Shandra help me find an article and she found one about blue whales which was good but it was also extremly hard so i couldnt do that either. Finally on my second to last day of working i found an article! This article is about the population of dolphins starting to decrease in the pacific ocean due to bycatch. Bycatch is when an animal is caught unintentionally while trying to catch a different animal intentionally. This happens to dolphins while fisherman try to catch tunas swimming around them. When the fisherman catch the dolphins in the net they are seperated from there mother if they are a calf and wont know where to go once they are put back in the water. This causes the death of many dolphin calfs because they can not survive on their own as a baby. Overall, i was very glad i chose this topic because i became more and more interesting as i went through it.

New project.

This week in my Marine biology class we were assigned a new project from Mr. Welton. In this project we have to make a Powerpoint Presentation about an article that we read that has to do with Marin Biology. We are allowed to pick the Article that most appeals to us. So i started looking at Ocean Sunfish because they look very cool and are known as the biggest fish in the world. I knew this because i have done a project about them years ago. When i couldnt find any good looking articles about them i switched to looking for jellyfish and then eventually a weird fish called a blob fish. I still couldnt find a fish so i am still looking at the moment. I will keep you updated!

Recap of week #...lost count

This week was very low key. We pretty much had a lecture on monday and on wednesday i started to flatten the sand in my tank because it was getting really bumpy. After i had flattened it, Mr. Welton filled the tank up to the top with ultra nasty tank water. After that there was not really much to do....except for the three testings we did with our tank. It was actually cool because the tubes turned different color so i had quite the colorful morning!

Omaha Class Trip!!!

I had so much fun on the trip to Omaha! We had to wake up extra early to be in Omaha by 9:30 so we were that at around 5:50. At first me and Molly tried to sleep in the backseat because it was so early but for me, I can not go back to sleep once I am awake. So i was up listening to the radio with the rest of our class. Jonathan even had a british speaking GPS that helped us along the way. When we were about a half an hour away from the Omaha zoo, we decided to stop at a gas station near by. Everyone got out to get something and i got beef jerky. I needed some real beef jerky to get the nasty taste out of my mouth which was Mr. Weltons deer jerky....gross.
When we got to the Omaha zoo, we were there a little early but we didn't know that so we waited around at the entrance freezing our butts off. When we finally got in we hung around the zoo for an hour before we got a tour from our guide. Our guide took us to the Aquarium and the first thing we saw were penguins. Some of them were even doing this shedding thing and it looked really gross. Next we went over to the octopus tank where the octopus was sort of sucking on the glass with his suction cups. There was also a huge one floating around so it was pretty awesome. After that, we went over to two tanks where in one there was what seemed to be about a thousand of the same fish swimming around and then the other tank was filled with glowing jellyfish, it was pretty tight. After that we went into this tunnel that had clear windows through the whole thing so there were a bunch of manta rays and sharks all swimming around us. There were even humongous sea turtles and little fish swimming with them as well.
After the tour of the aquarium concluded, our guide took us "behind the scenes" of the aquarium and we got to see over the tank! We got to see where they fed the fish and even kept animals that were not ready to become an attraction in the zoo yet. After this, our tour guide left us we went off to discover the zoo and all of the rest of the tour attractions. They were so cool and the scariest was when the gorilla hit our window because we were pissing him off. Overall, the trip was great and i defiantly recommend it for next years class.

     Leeches are Annelids and there are 3 types of them which are fresh water, terrestrial, and marine leeches. Just like earthworms, leeches are hermaphrodites. Leeches bodies are composed of 34 different segments and in the first six segments off their body they have the suckers which is used to connect to a host to feed on. They also release a type of anesthetic so that the host will not feel the leech on them. The leech uses a combination of mucus and suction to stay attached to the hosts blood stream. As you can probably already tell, leeches feast on animals blood and that is how they get all of their nutrients.
     Leeches also reproduce. Begin that leeches are hermaphrodites, leeches reproduce by reciprocal fertilization. The leech grows a sperm sack near the end of the tail and then the leech bites it off, thus reproducing. Leeches also have a clitellum which holds their eggs and secretes the cocoon. Leeches use spermataphores to make the sperm go out. The body figure of a leech is gross as well. Most leeches are extremely slimy and love to stick to mostly everything that contains blood. They dont have feet, just a slimy bottom that helps them move around everywhere.

Leeches have not really evolved a lot over the many years they have been around. Many people think that the leech is in ancestor of the earthworm because it has very similar characteristics but in fact it is in its own kind. I looked everywhere to find where the leech came from but i couldnt really find anything. If i had to guess i would think that the leeches came from some small fresh water fish that is long and slimy.