TWIS #9

This week in science we learned about dissecting. First we learned a little bit about the animals by doing a background research on each organism. Then we chose which organism we were gonna dissect. My group  chose a mouse and a frog. My partner and i dissected the mouse. First we took pictures of the mouse then we had to make the cut a certain way, so we took our time with the scalpel. After we cut it open, we took some more pictures, looked at the organs and even took some out. We were told to draw out the dorsal,external and internal view of the organism.
I learned that some of the organisms were pregnant and some weren't. The organism me and my partner had was not but, it looked like an adult mouse. We had a hard time finding out the gender though. We guessed that is was a female but, we were wrong. It did not have any ovaries so we found out it was a male .

This Month In Science #10

This month in science we are working on creating a human impacts t-shirt design. He got a visit from a few people from the human impacts institute, and they showed us some examples of slogans and pictures to help people understand how were impacting the world. We made up our own slogans and created a design concept for our t-shirts. My group is focusing on how pollution and oil spills are impacting our ocean water. The slogan we came up with is "Water you gonna do when its gone?". We thought it was very simple and catchy. After that we came up with an illustration for the T-shirt. The illustration shows four glasses of water, under each cup is a year. This illustration shows how we will lose water as the years go by. Each of the four cups lose water every ten years(in our drawing:1997,2007,2017,2027). It goes from past to future and show that if we keep polluted the ocean, we won't have any water left.
This month in science we learned how slogans and pictures(about human impact) can either be about awareness or action. Some of the pictures we saw were boring and had too much writing of a boring picture. Most of the other ones had interesting pictures and catchy slogans. They were straight to the point and sent a great message to people. Something else that i learned about was how hydrofracking, oil spills, and pollution is damaging our ocean alot. Soon all the oceans will be contaminated and they'll be no fresh water left. Hopefully my groups poster will make people realize whats happening to our ocean water .

The Sturgeon's Looming Endangered Listing

The Sturgeon species is becoming endangered because of many incidental catches. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is working with the fishing industry on ways in which it can minimize incidental catches. Sturgeon numbers have plummeted as much as 99% in some areas of the east coast and the NOAA hasn't developed a recovery plan, the listing could affect as much as 42 fisheries and those that support the gillnetting of monkfish and spiny dogfish in particular. The monkfish fishery generates $50 million alone, yearly so there are concerns about the effects of the listing.

In my opinion, I think that they should do what ever it takes to save the sturgeon species. They shouldn't go extinct just because fisherman keep accidentally catching them. Fisherman should try to be more careful and if they catch a sturgeon, they should return them back into the water. I have to admit that the article was confusing but, i agree with the author(Deborah Weisberg).