Finding Your Niche Poster Project

To illustrate your understanding of some major ideas in ecology, you will choose an animal (and an ecosystem) and design a poster.  Here is the checklist of everything that should be CLEARLY labelled and illustrated in your poster.   DUE: 9/30/2016

It is most important that your poster be well-researched and demonstrate your understanding (ahem, everything should be in your own words).  It is less important the size of paper, the number of images, etc.  It is OK to cut and paste images, however, 1) all the writing must be in your own words (typed OK) AND 2) this poster is NOT ONLY a food web. This should be your best work.  Your background research should have been done in these two assignments: Finding your niche background AND Ecosystem terms from class NOTES.

Map of world biomes
world biome descriptions

Bacteria Lab Conclusion

The 8-year-old boy had been playing outside
before he pressed his hand into the Petri dish.
Image from Tasha Sturm, a microbiologist, of her son's hand.

In class, we observed bacteria (& molds and yeasts) that you collected from around the building. 

YOUR drawing, data table and this conclusion are due TUESDAY 9/20 at the beginning of class.

8. Write a conclusion that completes the following components.

a.                   Restate the hypothesis and describe if it was confirmed or contradicted.

b.                   State the answer to your question.

c.                   Explain your results using your data (PUT NUMBERS IN YOUR WRITING!!!).

d.                  Describe procedure errors and any limitations or observed mistakes that influenced your results 

                       (be specific.  Just writing 'human error' is too vague.)

e.                  Describe modifications to improve the experiment procedure and future topics of study

f.                    Connect your findings to the real world or other studies. 

Tuskegee Experiment Overview

Jean Heller's article exposing Tuskegee Experiment

In 1972, Jean Heller published a New York Times article exposing the Tuskegee Trial.  This article led to a public outcry, demanding the study be stopped, and a congressional committe to re-evaluate Biomedical studies and their approval.  In class, we have read the article and made margin notes on this text.

Heller had been tipped off  by Peter Buxtun, a Public Health Services Venereal Disease Investigator.  Buxtun contacted the press after the national regulating body for disease research, the Center for Disease Control, refused to call the study off in the late 1960s.

Tuskegee Study Mixer: Roles

Some of the subjects of the Tuskegee Experiment,
photo credit: WikiCommons

These are the roles that you were assigned in class.

NOTE!:
You are not excpted to remember all of these individuals- we did the mixer as a way of understanding some of the perspectives in a complicated Case Study and to open our conversation about Bioethics.
IF you understand what the study was about, who was impacted, and where some questionable moral decisions were made, you are well prepared to continue on in this unit.