Biological+Resources

From Mike Nolan: Ant Colony Video - 3 minutes - Huge ant city excavated []

From: Wendy Mills Last year I had my 9th grade bio kids pick a biome and work in groups to create giant food webs. They had to create a food pyramid as well, showing energy flow and labeling primary producers, primary consumers etc. They used big sheets of butcher paper.

From Cornelia 'Lia' Harris, Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, Millbrook, NY RE Biodiversity lab We've been working on a unit that uses leaf packs to help students understand biodiversity; in addition it involves concepts ofclassification, scale, and functional groups. You can find the current version at: []. This is part of a five-year project todevelop environmental learning progressions, and so if you end up using it orhave feedback on the activity, I would be very thankful. Our Cary Institute curriculum websiteincludes a number of protocols for outdoor study; go to []and use the search features on the left to look at the protocols. There are also units there that might helpyou get started. Finally, I really likethe Ecoplexity website: [],there are a lot of good resources.

From JamesRodewald A great how-to article which shows how scientists aremeasuring whale populations in the Arctic. This include a variation ofmark-recapture and some great photos. []

For the 'greening' piece, we've been working on a projectwith a local school district in which the students gather data about theecological 'footprint' of the school...focusing on water, waste, energy, food,and biodiversity. Students collect dataon each of these components, we create a yearly scorecard to showcase theirwork, and then we have been making changes (slowly) in the school to improvethings... which will hopefully be reflected in their data each year. You can see the school's website for thisinfo: [].

From: James Rodewald A short yet iinteresting article from the Nature Conservancythat outlines some of the evidence that links extinctions to increased diseaserisks for humans. []