Yellowstone National Park, how the wolves changed rivers

How wolves changed Yellowstone National Park

In 1995, wolves where reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park. They had been absent for 70 years. The elk and deer population was big since no other animals where there to cut it down. The deer ate all the grass in the valleys and gorges so no grass or flowers lived there.

When the wolves arrived, they didn’t just kill some deer, the deer moved away from those valleys which lead to the growth of grass and flowers. The trees became taller which brang in plenty of different species of birds. Beavers came in to live there since they ate the trees. They created dams  and niches which allowed other species such as muskrates and otters to live in. The wolves killed the coyotes so the number of rabits and mice went up, which gave life to more hawks and eagles.

The wolves didn’t just change the Yellowstone National Parks ecosystem but also its physical appearence; the wolves changed the rivers. More trees started to grow close to the river banks, reinforcing the banks. The banks stopped collapsing so the river was healthier and wider.

The wolves kept the Yellowstone National Park alive by changing the ecosystem and its physical appearance.

Questions:

1.     Do you know another animal that changed the ecosystem or physical appearance of an area?

2.     How do you think the wolves kept the park alive in a way?

Site of the article:

http://www.geekexchange.com/see-how-wolves-can-change-an-entire-ecosystem-102645.html

Komodo dragon lizard

The Komodo dragon is the biggest lizard I the word. The Komodo dragon can grow up to 10 ft. and weights 70 kilograms. The lizards lives in the Indonesian islands of komodo. The Komodo dragon is a carnivores which means that they just eat meet. They eat invertebrate, birds, pigs, fish, snake and water buffaloes.

The lizard has a venomous bite which contains toxic proteins. The Komodo dragon has bit and eaten several people in the western manggaria regency.

There mating season begins in May and august and the eggs are laid in September. They lay about 20 eggs. The eggs are incubated for seven to eight months hatching in April. Young komodo dragons live in trees safe from predators. They take up to 8 to 9 years to mature and they live up to 30 years. They are also popular zoo exhibits because they are so big.

 

1. do you know another animal who has the same diet as the komodo dragon?

2.do u know another animal who lays eggs at the same months as the komodo dragons

New Species of Mushrooms were Discovered.

        Very recently in the city of London, Bryn Dentinger and Laura Martinez-Suz, mycologists at the Royal Botanic Gardens discovered three new types of mushrooms. But this mushrooms were not funded in the middle of the woods, neither in the middle of a rain forest, but they were founded in a package of dried porcini mushrooms from a grocery store in southwest greater London.

        After founding this rare mushroom species the scientist, using a technique called  DNA barcoding they tested this mushrooms. The technique involves matching the DNA profile of a sample to a database of known species so they can identify the sample. But in three out of 15 pieces tested from the porcini mushroom package, no match was found. This means that this mushrooms are new.

"None of them had scientific names, so these were essentially new species to science," Dentiger told CBC science columnist Torah Kachur. "And we found three different species in the 15 pieces that we sampled from."

        By thinking about this article, in three knew type of mushrooms can be created in a grocery store because of human activity, imagine of what can be created in the future because of us...

Do you think that there are more existing plant or animal species in the natural world than the ones we know?

Do you think that this kind of evolutions can cause a problem in the future?

Scientists find tiny, poisonous new mystery frog

Poison dart frogs many of which are threatened species live in Central and South America and secrete poisons that are used by hunters to make blow-darts. They are often brightly coloured, with varied colour patterns that scare off predators.

The new animal, found in Panama, is only 12.7 millimetres long. The frog’s smooth skin and its unique call mark it out as different from any of the other frogs in the region, and researchers are unsure how it came to look like it did.

Other frog’s poisons have been harnessed by hunters for weapons, but it is unlikely that the new discovery’s poison has ever been used in that way. It has been called andinobates geminisae, and a specimen was first collected in 2011. Scientists have been working since then to understand whether the animal was a new species, and to sequence its DNA.

Though researchers have seen the frog before, it was unclear whether it was just another variety of a similar species. Little is known about the species, but it appears to care for its young.

Because the animal can only be found in such a small area and so its existence could easily be threatened, scientists have laid out plans for how to protect the frog. That will involve including the frog in a captive breeding programme that helps protect amphibians from diseases and habitat loss.

 Read the article here: 

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/scientists-find-tiny-poisonous-new-mystery-frog-9760614.html 

Discussion Questions:

Do you know about any other new specie discovered?

What would you do so this new specie remains existing?

An Animal Gamble in the Arctic

Ice in Arctic waters shrank this summer to the sixth-lowest level in 36 years of monitoring, the National Snow and Ice Data Center reported Monday. The ice reached its seasonal minimum on Wednesday, at 1.9 million square miles. That is down only slightly from 2013 but is still 19 percent below average.

The Arctic is changing — fast. Two experts who have spent decades working there believe that the marine mammals who call the high latitudes home are now locked into a human-forced ecological game of chance. Jeffery DelViscio

Scientists are concerned about the ice melting from human-caused global warming because the melting may change the weather farther south. Studies have linked the ice melting to changes in the jet stream, which can produce extreme weather. Ice in Antarctic waters, meanwhile, is hitting record-high levels, which scientists attribute to local climatic conditions.  I think that one day the water will get so high that it will start spreading.

questions:  Do you think that this could cause lots of problems?

                   Do you think that this problem could continue?

 

Doctors enlisted to turn the tide on antibiotic resistance (for Alexandra Smith)

Antibiotic resistance

What is it?

Now that we are using antibiotics for everything, the viruses are adapting to the medicine that we are using to get rid of them. This means that some of the antibiotics are no longer effective or are not working as well as they use to because the bacteria is getting used to it. Some microbes are changing faster than antimicrobials can kill them. As a result, it’s once again possible to get an infection for which there is no sure cure. This is called antibiotic resistance, another way of explaining this phenomenon is that antibiotic resistance occurs when an antibiotic has lost its ability to effectively control or kill bacterial growth; in other words, the bacteria are "resistant" and continue to multiply in the presence of therapeutic levels of an antibiotic.

One cause of antibiotic resistance is the fact that farmers are giving their animals a bunch of this and that we are after consuming all of it.

Are you ready for a world without antibiotics?

Antibiotics are a bedrock of modern medicine. But in the very near future, we're going to have to learn to live without them once again. And it's going to get nasty. If we really lost antibiotics to advancing drug resistance — and trust me, we’re not that far away — here’s what we would lose. Not just the ability to treat infectious disease; that’s obvious but also the ability to treat cancer, and to transplant organs. Any treatment that relies on a permanent port into the bloodstream for example kidney dialysis would no longer be safe at all. We would not be able to do any major open-cavity surgery, on the heart, the lungs and the abdomen.

We’d lose the ability to treat people after traumatic accidents, as major as crashing your car and as minor as your kid falling out of a tree. We’d lose the safety of modern childbirth: Before the antibiotic era, 5 women died out of every 1,000 who gave birth. One out of every nine skin infections killed. Three out of every 10 people who got pneumonia died from it and that’s where we are headed again.

And we’d lose, as well, a good portion of our cheap modern food supply. Most of the meat we eat in the industrialized world is raised with the routine use of antibiotics, to fatten livestock and protect them from the conditions in which the animals are raised. Without the drugs that keep livestock healthy in concentrated agriculture, we’d lose the ability to raise them that way. Either animals would sicken, or farmers would have to change their raising practices, spending more money when their margins are thin. Either way, meat, poultry, pork — and fish and seafood, also raised with abundant use of antibiotics— would become much more expensive.

Read the article here: 

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/doctors-enlisted-turn-tide-antibiotic-resistance 

Questions:

1) Are you ready for a world without antibiotics? Why do you think so or not so?

2) What else would antibiotic resistance affect?

Elephants appear to be super sniffers

Everyone knows that elephants trunks are very strong and useful. A great example of this is that they can lift objects with their trunk and also spit water out of it. Researchers looked at bush elephants (Laxodonta Africana). These are the largest of Africa’s two species. They usually live in grassy areas hence to why we call them bush elephants.

 Did you know that elephants are amazing sniffers? Elephants have around 2,000 scent-sensing genes. Isn’t that crazy? Other good sniffers like rats have around 1,200 genes for scent-sensing, blood hounds and other dogs have around 800 of these different genes and humans have around 40 of them. Elephants use their great trunks to smell predators from far away. They can ‘’find’’ people from the two ethnic groups living near them in east Africa that are trying to hunt them. That helps the elephants defend themselves and helps them know when the people are close. Scents play a HUGE role in the elephant’s behavior. Example: the elephant can communicate aggression via scent.

These large mammals may be the world’s best smellers!

https://student.societyforscience.org/article/elephants-appear-be-super-sniffers 

Questions:

1. How do you think that elephants can communicate via scent?

2. Do you think that it would be a good thing to have a trunk that can smell as well as an elephant’s? Explain your answer.

Is the Orca a whale?

The Orca is actually categorized as a dolphin, this is because dolphins are a sub-category of a sub-category of whales, that means that all dolphins are whales, but it is necessary to note that not all whales are dolphins. The Orca (or Killer whale), scientifically is a dolphin, the largest of the dolphins.

It is a member of a family called delphinidae (a dolphin family), in this family you will find the bottle-nose, common, and Hector's dolphins, in fact, Hector's dolphin and the Orca are alike.

 

Killer whales are found in all oceans, from the frigid Arctic and Antarctic regions to tropical seas. They have a diverse diet, although individual populations often specialize in particular types of prey. Some feed exclusively on fish, while others hunt marine mammals (like pinnipeds) and even large whales.

 

Killer whales are highly social; some populations are composed of matrilineal family groups which are the most stable of any animal species. Their sophisticated hunting techniques and vocal behaviors, which are often specific to a particular group and passed across generations, have been described as manifestations of culture.

 

The difference between an orca and a whale is that whales have baleen which they use to sieve food into their mouths and an orca and dolphins have teeth.

 

 Article:

 

http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2011/04/killer-whales-are-actually-dolphins/

 

 

Questions:

 

1. How will you classify the Orca; as a whale or as a dolphin? Why?

 

2. You know about another animal that can be classify in two families?

Young blood: The elixir of youth?

A few years ago there was a phenomenon of books and movies called "Twilight" which centered around a vampire and his human girlfriend. In the story importance was placed on human blood being a factor behind why vampires stay young, seemingly forever.  Of course vampires and the "Twilight" books are all fictional, yet it seems that there is some truth even in fiction. In the case of laboratory mice scientists have found that the blood of young mice, when given to older mice helps improve the memory of older mice and helps the older mice muscles.

  Originally the scientists connected blood vessels between older and younger mice, which showed that the younger mice did not benefit from the blood of older mice. So then, they decided to just try giving older mice the blood from younger mice and found that the older mice had healthier hearts and livers. The brains of the older mice also improved thanks to the effect on their brain cells or neurons which worked more efficiently.  This resulted in the older mice becoming  "smarter" and growing new brain cells, something that usually only occurs in young mice.

Now before you stop visiting your grandparents, because you might be worried that they might ask you to donate blood, this article only talks about research done in mice.  If this was ever to be applied to humans, researchers would isolate the substance in blood which is responsible for this beneficial change. For now the researcher done on mice indicates that a protein found in the blood of mice known as GDF11, which stands for growth differentiation factor 11, might be very important to understand more about how this process works.

The article written by Lida Katsimpardi shows the importance of asking questions and learning from our fellow species how our own bodies work and applying that knowledge to benefit the human species. It makes us wonder is there more to our blood cells than just blood, such as a "magic" protein which can help us stay young ?  Either way I will keep eating my veggies and spinach, until we have more understanding of GDF11 and how it works.  For now daily exercise and plenty of sleep will be my solution to aging too fast.

 You can find the article here:     

https://student.societyforscience.org/article/young-blood-elixir-youth

Discussion Questions :

 

1.  Can you think of another example of a substance or food where the promise of a longer life is based on eating or drinking something which will have immediate health benefits?  Do these examples have a negative side effect that accompanies the intended positive effect ?

 

2. What are the moral implications of asking teenagers for their blood so that products can be made for older people to make them younger ?   How will this affect the nice and neighborly habit of donating blood simply for the sake of helping a stranger with their health ?