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Class Weblogs |
New! More Artificial Selection (10/25/04)
The color and textural variations in these fall gourds increases every year. This one in the foreground resembles the ball & claw feet of some classic furniture designs. The extremely warty one in the background makes me a little uneasy!. |
Grades New
York State Regents Living Environment Core Curriculum
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New! Fall Foliage (10/25/04)
Conventional
wisdom has long held that fall leaf colors have no adaptive value.
Recent studies however suggest that showy colors may "advertise"
to potential pests (insects, e.g.) that the tree is healthy and maybe the
insects should look elsewhere for a weaker tree to attack. Another
hypothesis suggests that the fall colors act as a sunscreen to protect the
leaf while it "dismantles" itself - shipping much of the basic
material for photosynthesis back into the tree's tissues for winter storage. Read
more. |
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New! Artificial Selection (MSWord Doc) (10/16/04) My notes on artificial selection with images
of dog breeds for visual effect, and how the process suggested to Darwin a
mechanism for transmutation of species (evolution). Of course that mechanism
would be called Natural Selection, whereby nature (the environment)
is the selecting agent rather than humans. |
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Caterpillar Camouflage (9/26/04)
What is this thing that looks like bird poop
on a leaf? Look a little closer and I think you'll figure it out. It's
a caterpillar, disguised as bird droppings. I took this picture at a
butterfly farm on St. Martin Island (Dutch West Indies). It was a
terribly hot August day and my kids were with me, and not in much of a mood
for me to be taking notes, so I didn't get any other information about this
species at the time. I did a google search, and it turns out that a
lot of caterpillars look like bird droppings, but I couldn't find an image
of a species that looked as realistic as this one. |
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Cicada Molting (8/18/04)
These insects have a very interesting life
cycle, part of which is captured in this photo. If you walk around the
streets of Washington Heights now (Late August) you can hear them throughout the day and
into the evening hours. (Click here
for a website that has audio files to hear the sounds of cicadas).
They spend most of their lives under ground as nymphs ( a stage of
incomplete metamorphosis between egg & adult), emerge every seven years
or so, molt, fly around making lots of noise and mating/laying eggs for a
few, weeks, then die. A few species of cicadas have periodic or synchronized
life cycles and go through the stages together at the same time and have
even longer nymph stages - 13 - 17 years), but most have staggered life
cycles, and each year a certain number emerge from underground to mate &
die. Click on the above link for a lot more details about these fascinating
creatures. |
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Lotus Pod (7/15/04)
You've probably seen the dried version of our
mystery photo. This is what it looks like before it's dried. If you are
really ambitious, you can look in a florist shop to find the dried form. The
lotus is a water plant. You are looking at the seed pod of a lotus
plant, which grows high on a stalk about a meter above the surface of the
water for this particular species. This photo was take at the New York Botanical
Garden in the Bronx. |
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Slug on a Rock* (7/1/04) This is the first in what I hope will be an ongoing series of nature & other science related photographs by yours truly. See Copyright Note below.
Interaction
of biotic & abiotic factors. The rock is a non-living
factor. If you look closely, you will see greenish-gray areas on
the rock. These lichens
- which themselves are a peculiar, very interesting symbiotic
relationship between a fungus and an algae - are of course living or
biotic factors. I think the slug (biotic again) is probably eating
the lichens, but I didn't actually witness evidence of the slug
eating. Water, another abiotic factor, is important to both the
lichen & the slug. The rocks on the morning of this photo were
wet from the recent rain. You don't see many slugs crawling around
on hot dry rocks - they would quickly dehydrate. The lichens need
water to carry out their life processes just like any other living
thing, but they can go into dormant states when dried out and survive
for long periods of time. Slugs, by the way, are obviously related
to snails, they just don't have a shell. Question: Are slugs
snails without shells or are snails just slugs with shells? Put
another way, which came first, the slug or the snail? |
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New! Course Packet (6/24/04) (PDF Format) The entire course packet with summer reading
assignments for students who are taking regents living environment next year
in classes 801 & 807. In case you missed the last day of school
when packets were distributed or in case you lose yours over the
summer. You will need to print the entire document, all 28 pages.
All assigned pieces are to be completed by the first day of school,
September 13, 2004. |
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New! Welcome (5/23/04) I hope that you the student find some useful
links and information here. I will have all of your assignments posted
along with due dates and resources for completing many of the
assignments. Anytime you need to review the course, find answers to
old assignments, look up information about a biology topic, you should be
able to find it here. I am also looking into the possibility of posting your
grades on a secure site - stay tuned. |
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All photos are by M. Gatton unless otherwise noted. All photos by M. Gatton are copyright free for non-commercial use. |
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Mr. Gatton's Planning Calendar
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Updated: 08/30/07
©2000 |
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