Cephalopodcast

“It appears to be confined to the Mediterranean Sea, where it grows, especially on the southern coast, attached to rocks at considerable depths in the sea. It is fished up from the deep by means of nets and other instruments. The manufacture of ornaments of this coral at Naples is of great extent.” — Goodrich, 1859
Source: S. G. Goodrich Animal Kingdom Illustrated Vol 2 (New York: Derby & Jackson, 1859)

It’s Deep-Sea Coral Week over at the Deep-Sea News blog, from April 27-May 3. It’s worth a look, with many interesting posts already up and many more to come each day.

Coral Clipart

The Florida Center for Instructional Technology
has made a number of antique woodcuts and engravings available online for educational use. Many of these include things zoological, including several anthozoan images.

While the license is generous, this collection could really benefit from an updated treatment with Creative Commons. Also, like most clipart collection, many of the specimens are mis-classified. For instance, larval arthropods are generously mixed in with the annelids. But those vermiform organisms were vexatious even for Linneaus (say that fast seven times).

In no particular taxonomic order

• Clipart ETC: Corals and Sea Anemone
• Clipart ETC: Sponges
• Clipart ETC: Squid and Octopus
• Clipart ETC: Worms (and caterpillars)
• Clipart ETC: Zoology A
• Clipart ETC: Sea Urchins and Sea Stars
• Clipart ETC: Sea Cucumbers
• Clipart ETC: Mollusk M - Z
• Clipart ETC: Fish S - Z
• Clipart ETC: Crustaceans

It can be a challenge for environmental non-profits and educational outfits to produce original multimedia content. On a tight budget it can be tough to produce compelling content in-house, so at some point, the question of using stock images or video comes up. This has a cost too in the form of licensing, clearances and properly managing the rights to the media. Fortunately, there are some low cost (and free) resources available.

Reef Vid

A resource of free coral reef video clips for educational use

Professor Peter Mumby from the University of Exeter has made available a number of coral reef video clips. The database has over 500 clips which are free for educational and research use. The clips on the Web site are suitable for use in a PowerPoint presentation. Full-quality footage is available on mini-DV tapes, DVD, or DVD-ROM (recorded in PAL) by contacting them.

Environmental Video from the Feds

The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration also maintains a library of public domain video footage. The only cost is for reproduction, there are no other licenses or clearances required. All they ask is that you credit them as the source. In particular, I’ve found the Year of the Ocean, Turtle Excluder Device (TED) and Commercial Fishing to be useful stock footage for many projects. They also have a photo library of royalty-free still images.

Quality at a Price

Finally, there are also exceptional stock libraries available for a fee. The quality of these is incredible and the staff are available to help you find just the right image for your message. Some of the more marine-themed ones are listed below.

Have you used any other video resources for ocean conservation? Let me know.

• Reef Vid
• NOAA B-Roll
• Stock Photo: Image Quest 3-D
• Stock Video: Ocean Footage
• Stock Video: BioMedia Associates. Bacteria, Protozoans and more.
• Stock Video: Al Giddings Images
• Previously: Vintage Ocean and Science Fair Footage
• Previously : Free fish pics: NOAA updates online photo library
• Previously: Free undersea images from Coral Reef Alliance

Eggcase from a skate. © J. Robertshaw

The Great Eggcase Hunt

With the coming of spring in the northern hemisphere also comes a time to hunt for eggs. But it’s not just about birds anymore. The folks over at the Shark Trust also want people to head to the beach to look out for the fecundity of fish.

Colloquially known as mermaid’s purses, eggcases are the protective capsules laid by skates and some rays**. Inside is a tiny baby skate and a big yolk sac. Typically the capsules have odd keels and horns to help them remain tangled in seaweed and camouflaged on the bottom. The young develop for several months before hatching out as miniature adults. But after hatching, the horny cases begin to breakdown and may come loose, washing up on the shore. Storms might also dislodge living ones from the bottom. If you find a lot of eggcases in an area, it may indicate that a skate nursery is located nearby. This kind of information is valuable to conservationist who are trying to protect these species.

Why does the Shark Trust want you to record eggcases? In recent decades several species of skate and ray around the…coast have dramatically declined in numbers…The identification of these critical areas will enable the Shark Trust to propose conservation measures, in order to reverse the decline of these charismatic animals.

So now’s your chance to contribute to skate and ray conservation and have a lot of fun at the same time.

They have a lot of resources for citizen scientists and for educators who want to organize a local eggcase hunt. And if you don’t live near the coast, you can still take some time this spring to create your own giant eggcases (PDF link) out of balloons and papier-mâché. Or better yet, make some chocolate ones that you can send to me!

• Great Eggcase Hunt
• A Fieldguide to Eggcases (PDF)
• **What’s the difference between a skate and a ray?

Rabbitfish Helping to Save the Reef

Continuing with my aquatic version of things vernal, there is news that rabbitfish might be helping to save the Great Barrier Reef. Many herbivorous reef fish species like parrotfish and tangs regularly graze on the fast-growing algae of the reefs. But apparently they only like to eat it when it’s young and not too weedy. This is where the rabbitfish comes in.

“Then, to our even greater surprise a fish we had never seen in this area before was observed grazing on the weed. The rabbitfish (Siganus canaliculatus), came out of nowhere and began to clear-fell the weed placed on the reef crest.”

The rabbitfish were caught on underwater videocams, in schools of up to 15 fish, grazing the crest, slopes and outer flats of the reef, and chomping away at more than ten times the rate of other weed-eaters.

• Red Orbit: Rabbitfish Helping to Save the Great Barrier Reef
• Science Daily: Rabbit Fish To The Rescue Of The Reef

sƎʇɐʞs ɹƎɥ :ɐ*

How not to overwhelm with Charts and Graphs

Over on the 43Folders blog, Matt Turk is asking how he can improve his academic presentation style.

I am in a fairly quantitative science…Unfortunately, what most people in my field do is to simply overwhelm the audience with lots of facts and charts and bullet points. Obviously this is a bad idea — but on the other hand, if you don’t give enough ’serious-looking’ plots, you run the risk of being dismissed by the majority of the people in the audience.

So how do I strike a balance? How do I keep my presentations in the manner of a good narrative, with appropriate display methods, when constrained by an audience that could liberally describe as ‘hostile’?

There are obligatory recommendations of Tufte, but also to The Craft of Research by Booth, Colomb, and Williams.

If you have any ideas about effectively communicating science information, head on over to 43Folders and chime in.

Make magazine has instructions on building your own miniature aquatic biosphere. I took the weekend challenge and made my own using specimens from a retention pond near work. There were snails and crustaceans in abundance, including grass shrimp (Palaemonetes sp.), amphipods (aka, scuds) and copepods.

The instructions call for the use of a sea shell to help with buffering. I thought I would be smart and use a small deer antler instead. It looked good at first, but I never properly degreased the thing, so the set up went south pretty quickly. I removed the antler and restarted with a little crushed coral gravel. I also added the iconic econaut refuge (orange diver) and a little bit of hornwort purchased from the pet store.

Cephalovlog #2: 60 Seconds of Green Pond Scum

I made a little video featuring some of the critters. I used a jeweler’s loupe held next to my Canon ZR500 and Powershot A95 (movie setting) to get close-up shots of them in action. It was edited with iMovie and scored in Garageband.

Click To Play

Blip.tv | YouTube

Lessons Learned

Needless to say, this is a great lesson in ecosystem management. Unlike an aquarium, the tabletop biosphere is a closed system. All nutrients must cycle from the plants (producers) to the animals (consumers) and back again (via decomposers/bacteria). A well balanced biosphere can last a couple of years, with some commercial manufacturers claiming systems that have run for ten years or more.

In addition to the articles from Make, there are several lesson plans out there for starting biospheres in the classroom. It might be interesting to get students started with these at the beginning of the year and see which ones last the longest. See the links below for more ideas.

Tendrils

I also wanted to highlight another sources of inspiration for this project. It is an aquascaping photoblog simply called Green. I encourage you to marvel at the beautiful macro photography of Marcus Wallinder’s miniature worlds. And if its zen-like, award-winning design inspires you, then here are more than 130 palettes to “help you get your green on” too.

• Make: Tabletop Biosphere, with resource citations
• Make a Tabletop Biosphere - Make: PDFcast
• Make a Tabletop Biosphere - Make: Video Podcast
• Home Made Biospheres
• Make Labs Biosphere & more!
• Lesson plans (Ohio): It’s a Small World After All! (Pond Microcosms)
• Lesson plans: Examining the Human Impact on our Environment
• Water on the Web: Microcosm Setup and Sample Collection Instructions
• Bottle Biology
• BBC/OU Open2.net: DIY Science - Ecospheres
• Make your own homemade ecosphere
• The Miracle Whip Microcosm
• Ecobottle Investigations
• Green: aquascape photoblog
• Best Of Color Inspiration: 130+ Green Color Palettes
• Flickr: Biosphere symbol/label
• Flickr: My BioJar photos
• Previously: Tiny Lightbulb Tanks

The 2007 Annual National Marine Educators Association Conference is under way in Portland, Maine. Sadly, I will not be able to attend NMEA this year. However, I did get a chance to present last year. My wife and I also took that opportunity to tour through New York City. Our last day was rather rainy, and somewhere in SoHo we serendipitously ducked into the Scholastic Retail Store to avoid the downpour. It was a pretty amazing space, with lots of primary colors and opportunities for young readers. I picked up a book on sharks to share with my co-workers.

Back at work, summer camp was still underway. During the first sessions the kids were asked to draw a picture of a scientist, which is pretty standard stuff*. Their efforts were posted up in the classroom and I had a chance to check in a couple of times to see the progress. Many of them initially drew the archetypal illustration of a white male in a lab coat doing something with test tubes. And it was also interesting to note how many of the younger Aquakids (students entering grades 1-4) had a hard time distinguishing between science and magic. Many of them conflated chemistry with potion making and mixed up the regalia of wizardry with that of the laboratory.

Which brings me back to Scholastic. They are the the American distributor for the Harry Potter series. Many people intuitively argue that Harry Potter is good because it gets young people reading. Others are not so sure. So one might also blame Scholastic for contributing to the confusion in the kids’ illustrations. But the picture isn’t that clear. Scholastic also has a remarkable partnership with the American Museum of Natural History called Science Explorations.

The program promises to, “engage students and teachers with authentic, hands-on science investigations with real scientists, primary documents, genuine artifacts, and standards-based science inquiries based on the Museum’s resources.” In additon to print publications, engagement currently seems to consist of a half-dozen interactive, Flash-based websites. These include exhibits on bats, bugs, space, reptiles and Charles Darwin. But naturally enough, my favorite one is Investigating The Giant Squid: Mysterious Cephalopods of the Sea. The exploration includes a virtual dissections and an interview/slideshow with Dr. Neil Landman from the AMNH. I am planning on posting this bit to TONMO (if it is not there already) because they recently started a new K-12 forum devoted to using cephalopods in education.

Science Explorations also has a section called Writing with Scientists. It offers teachers and students, “step-by-step support to transform a collection of notes, observations, research, and experiments into a well-organized, thorough, and thoughtful science report.” You can read examples of how students use the resource over here.

• *DAST: Draw A Scientist Test
• Science Explorations Teacher Guide to Investigate the Giant Squid
• TONMO K-12 Education: Cephalopod resources and information for teachers and students.
• My NMEA 2006 Flickr album
• Previously: Squidology