PlanetGreen.com featured an essay published by Assistant Professor John Vucetich and his colleague at Michigan State, Michael Nelson, as one of its five tips for actio
n on Earth Day. See tip four at Tips .
| by Jennifer Donovan, director of public relations
Frank Best, a 1975 forestry alumnus and middle-school science teacher at Menominee Catholic Central, is bringing two groups of sixth, seventh and eighth grade students to Michigan Tech for a hands-on science experience on Monday and Tuesday, Sept. 13-14. On Monday, they will take a learning cruise of Portage and Torch Lake and Lake Superior on the Research Vessel Agassiz. Each group will spend two hours on Tuesday in the lab, where the students will dissect lake trout stomachs and examine the water samples they gathered under a high powered microscope. They will use a guidebook to identify the algae in their water sample. They will also study the organisms they collect from bottom samples. Using all this data, they will construct a food web of the lake. This is the fifth year that Best has brought his students to Michigan Tech. After riding on the Agassiz himself during a summer course he took at Tech on “Using Navigation to Teach Math,” he decided it would be an ideal hands-on learning experience for his students. “One of my main goals as a science and math teacher is to expose students who use math and science in their jobs,” said Best. “I want students to understand that math and science are ways of looking at our world, not just classes that you have to take in school.” The teacher said his students gain a great deal of knowledge about the Lake Superior ecosystem from their time on the Agassiz. “They also get to experience so much more than I can show them in the classroom,” he added. “They get to use state-of-the-art equipment that we can not afford at our small school.” The Agassiz will make several stops to enable the students to measure the depth, temperature and dissolved oxygen of the lakes at different depths. They will also sample the mud on the bottom of the lakes to find out what might be living down there. They will use a plankton net to capture some of the members of the plankton community. While the students are at Tech, they will also see a MSE demonstration and visit Nara Nature Park as part of a SFRES program. The Menominee students will stay at St. Anne’s church in Chassell and St. Albert the Great church in Houghton. |
Professor David Flaspohler has received $72,512 from the National Science Foundation for the first year of a potential five-year, $349,488-project, “Interactive effects of predation and ecosystem size on arthropod food webs in Hawaiian forests fragmented by lava flows.”