So far we've documented 12 species of feeder birds at our school bird feeder. None, however, are as cool as THIS bird. Check out this video from the "Life of Birds" series:

Today Bill was in to do this month's brown trout lesson. The above shows a food chain. We have a sample of algae on the right and one of the brown trout on the left. In the middle we are missing an important link in the chain that eats the algae but acts as a food source for trout; the Daphnia, or "water flea." We fed daphnia to our trout to see if they would recognize it as a food source because up until now they have just been feeding on fish food. We concluded that these fish instinctually fed on these prey even though they had never encountered them before.
Curtis Observes his hungry brown trout.

Bill Davenhall: Your health depends on where you live | Video on TED.com


Great Video! Makes you appreciate how clean the Finger Lakes area is.

Midterm Review

Here is the presentation from class. Please use this to fill out your review sheet.

Midtermreview

View more presentations from Chad DeVoe.

My highschool class is currently testing the anti-microbial properties
of different spices. We created about 10 agar plates with a different
spice in each one. Tomorrow we will see if any spice inhibits the
growth of a non-pathogenic strain of E. coli, the bacteria we
innoculated the plates with.

Video from today's skits!

Today we checked for bacteria growing in certain locations of the room and school. Here, Trevor and Alan swab and label their agar plate. The plates will spend 24 hrs in the incubator. Bacteria grow best in dark, moist, and warm places so we've created the best conditions and an optimal food source for them to thrive.
Sam and Courtney test for bacteria on the exoskeleton of our pet cockroach.

Students have been hard at work researching an infectious disease during our unit on bacteria and viruses. These are due tomorrow (Wed) and students have the opportunity to act out their skits if they'd like to. It should be interesting.

I'm pleased to announce that Groton Central School was awarded a $500 grant to install a "Hoop House" at our student vegetable garden for the purpose of growing spinach and other leafy vegetables for the school cafeteria. This will allow us to add 3-4 months on to our growing season and add more crops while school is in session. The grant was provided by the New York "Agriculture in the Classroom" program. SO....what this means is that I'll be looking for volunteers this spring that would like to be involved with the construction of this greenhouse and the planting proccess.

With all this talk of things "microbiological", it's often hard to know what is smallest. Are bacteria larger than viruses?? Are Cells bigger than atoms?? This cool little website gives us a great look at these questions:

http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/begin/cells/scale/

Hey everyone,

Hope you all had a wonderful break and are ready to get back into the swing of things in the new year! Just wanted to say thank you to Mr. DeVoe and every single student for an amazing experience. I learned alot from you, and hopefully you have learned alot from me as well (thats the idea of me being a teacher). I might even be roaming to halls of Groton as a substitute come May, you can't get rid of me this easily. You are all in good hands with Mr. DeVoe, hope you all continue to learn and grow as students and individuals.

Hey are some pictures from my last day!