Project
Our project was to find a solution for a real world problem involving some form of biology. My group, Alexis, Holly Thomas, and I decided to do our project on beached whales. As we looked into it, we found that these whales where mainly washing ashore dead due to their digestive systems being filled with trash causing them to stave to death. On average, whales are measured to have 30 pounds of trash in their system but, one had as much as 64 pounds of trash in it, ranging from plastic bags, to shoes, to a drum. We need to help these whales and to do that, we are going to have to change a few things.
Whales are known to be the largest living organism on the planet, with the largest being the blue whale. However even with their staggering size of 180 metric tons and length of 30 meters (98 ft), our tiny trash can make a huge difference in their lives, and in some cases, end it. These massive creatures often mistake our trash food and consume it as if it were. However this trash that they eat doesn't easily decompose, even to the chemicals in a whales stomach. The main killer is plastic which takes 450 years to naturally decompose, and since the whale can't digest it, the trash just stays there inside the whale. When whale consumes enough trash, it eventually blocks off the entire digestive system together preventing the whale from being to eat food, killing it. This can be changed very easily though and the solution isn't as far out of reach as many see it.
Biology
Ecology is the study of how organisms interact with both other organisms and their environment. Biologists use the organization of ecology to sort different groups of organisms. An individual is a single organism. Individuals come together to form populations, which are groups of individuals of the same species in the same area. A community is a set of populations in a given area. When communities interact with the abiotic factors of their environment, they form an ecosystem. Groups of contiguous ecosystems with similar climate and species are called biomes. The biomes form the biosphere, the area of Earth where all life exists. In our project, we aimed to save the population of tigers in the Greater Mekong ecosystem. The carbon cycle is the set of processes that move carbon (most commonly in the form of carbon dioxide) throughout an ecosystem. The carbon cycles between land, air, and water in its endless journey around the ecosystem. Carbon is released into the atmosphere form sources such as fossil fuels and cellular respiration from both plants and animals. Sinks, such as plants and bodies of water, help to remove carbon from the atmosphere, maintaining a delicate balance. Other nutrients, such as nitrogen, phosphorous, and water are also moved through ecosystems in their own unique cycles.
Reflection
Over the course of this I learned a few new interesting facts about whales and how they live. I also learned how us humans live and we have almost no regard to the other organism that we are effecting. Some things that I enjoyed with this project was the independence, we got to pick our own topic and research it how we wanted to which I feel lead to a nicer outcome. Another thing I learned was that some small actions as a person don't do much, but as a group can do a lot.
Some things that can be improved for the future would be to be more realistic for our problems solutions. During the start of this project the teacher made it out to seem as if she wanted us to fix a major world problem and actually show evidence of it working. We clearly didn't have the resources nor ability to accomplish such a task so after a few days the issue was sorted out. Also there were days that were classified as project work days that we had no time to actually work on our project.
A peak that we had during this project was the teamwork and communication that went into it. However on the other hand we a pit that we had was trying to come up with a new solution that hadn't already been tried before.
Some things that can be improved for the future would be to be more realistic for our problems solutions. During the start of this project the teacher made it out to seem as if she wanted us to fix a major world problem and actually show evidence of it working. We clearly didn't have the resources nor ability to accomplish such a task so after a few days the issue was sorted out. Also there were days that were classified as project work days that we had no time to actually work on our project.
A peak that we had during this project was the teamwork and communication that went into it. However on the other hand we a pit that we had was trying to come up with a new solution that hadn't already been tried before.