Strange Request - Dead Corals
- Thread starter Mr.Asbury
- Start date
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LoneStarReef
Active Member
I would love to hear your experiences about how you are using your tank to teach your class (besides the topic you already mentioned). I am helping my son’s 8th grade biology teacher set up a tank in her room and she wants me to teach the class about the tank and about various topics related to marine ecosystems.
OP
OP
Mr.Asbury
Active Member
Thank you, I will do that instead! I'm sure the Chem. department will be happy with that decision as well, since I won't have to go and borrow some of their ethanol ;Happy
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Mr.Asbury
Active Member
I plan to make a trip up there again next weekend, and will ask at that time. I'm just not sure if they want to advertise their dead corals =p.
I'd be happy to share some stuff once I start to do labs with the tank. So far, we've only really done some general water quality talks/tests since the tank is rather empty. I plan to do ecology right before Christmas and conservation stuff in January/February (depending on how cold/snowy of a winter we have - we get a fair amount of "snow days" that really mess up the planning process).
There are a few things that I have planned that could easily be scaled to any grade or ability level students. I plan on having the kids make "baseball cards" of stuff in the tank - give the classification of it, common names, oceans it can be found in, "role" in the ocean's food chain, etc. I also want to have the kids design a setup to harvest pods to talk about food chains/webs and do a little competition with that. I plan on doing a bit on fertilizer getting into the oceans (since we'll need to use some sort of this to grow the algae for the pods), and use this to discuss red tides & do testings on its effect on the DO levels in water. There's a lot more I plan to do, but there's a few examples. I'd be happy to help out in any way I can - feel free to PM me any time, and I'll make a note to send you some information once I have a little more solid plans to share!
SnailQueen
Community Member
I teach environmental science mostly and I've shown my students the NOVA episode titled "Lethal Seas" about ocean acidification and its impact on fish and reefs. It pairs nicely with a demo on calcium carbonate being dissolved by various strengths of acids. If you've got skeletons, you could definitely have them develop an experiment to test out the impact of various levels of acidification on the skeletons, too. If you don't have enough skeletons to work with, the chem people might be nice enough to lend you some calcium carbonate. I'm fortunate that in my tiny school, I also sometimes teach chem and have access to all the useful stuff all the time 
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Mr.Asbury
Active Member
I teach environmental science mostly and I've shown my students the NOVA episode titled "Lethal Seas" about ocean acidification and its impact on fish and reefs. It pairs nicely with a demo on calcium carbonate being dissolved by various strengths of acids. If you've got skeletons, you could definitely have them develop an experiment to test out the impact of various levels of acidification on the skeletons, too. If you don't have enough skeletons to work with, the chem people might be nice enough to lend you some calcium carbonate. I'm fortunate that in my tiny school, I also sometimes teach chem and have access to all the useful stuff all the time
My Chem department is very good, and I'm sure they'd loan some out so we don't destroy an actual coral skeleton. It sounds like a great lab, thanks for sharing! If you have any kind of intro reading and/or conclusion questions you give the kids after, could you send them to me?
SnailQueen
Community Member
I've used variations on the labs below depending on the year and the level of student. The AP kids I usually expect to do additional research on the topic themselves and ask them what sorts of (practical) solutions they can come up with for the problem based on their research. Lower level students I might ask to plot the change in mass of the shell/frag as it changes with time and/or increasing acid concentration. Intro wise, I usually do this after they've seen Lethal Seas so they have some idea about what's going on, but it gives them a chance to collect and verify the data presented in it for themselves. There's also some good background stuff on the Lethal Seas site.
Lab 1 - https://apesknow.weebly.com/ocean-acidification-lab-report.html
Lab 2 - https://teachingapscience.com/ocean-acidification-experimental-design-lab/
Lethal Seas link (see content at very bottom, video can be found on YouTube) - http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/earth/lethal-seas.html
