Gretchen Brinza
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Next Steps After Larvae and Dead Animals: Dead Plants!

3/5/2020

 
Picture
With figuring out so much about the dead animal and the bugs that visit it, we are starting to see that maybe dead stuff doesn't disappear, it just goes somewhere else.  The mathematical models we built are really helping us see some patterns between organisms living in an ecosystem together.

We went back to the DQB to realize that we can answer many questions, but we've still got some figuring out to do!  We've got lots of questions around dead plants and the factors that may affect them (and animals, too).  So we're putting our focus there next!
We went to town summarizing the variables we wanted to test, and assigned each group one of them so we can pool all our data together!

Each group agreed to build their model with stuff that includes dead plant parts (Mrs. Brinza and the students all agreed to bring things in) and we'll also have so other things available to mimic the natural environments as well.  Things like wind (a fan), sun (a heat lamp), nighttime (darkness in a closet) and age (really old berries)​!  And since all of these things were found in natural environments, we couldn't forget the ground!  We've got soil from outside and worms...of course there's worms in the soil, right?
Picture

Building Our Dead Plant Columns--and Recording Changes through Drawings and Pictures Over Time!


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    Have you ever seen something like the dead raccoon above?  Did it disappear?  

     

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