COSEE NOW

This activity is intended to help students understand how fisheries scientists collect and analyze data about the local fish populations. Through a simulate field seasons, students are exposed to what fish science in the field looks like. Also, students must analyze their data and compare it with the 40 years of actual Black Sea Bass data. The activity is meant to model the work of fisheries scientists and enable students to see natural fluctuations and the effects of humans on wild populations.

Make connections between the physical characteristics of an environment and the organisms that inhabit it by having students engage in a kinetic game interpreting ocean temperature data while role playing a fish with specific physical water requirements in a game that simulates one year in time.

Using ocean data products, students will explore the relationship between seasons as we observe them on land and seasons in the ocean. Working in pairs or small groups, students will be challenged to explain the differences and similarities seen within the ocean data to their experiences with continental seasons.

Not only do physical characteristics of ocean water change over horizontal distance, they also change with depth. Students use a model simulating the three-dimensional aspects of the ocean to create a cross section of the water column. This is done to visually define the idea of a cross section, and to familiarize students with looking at cross sections. Once comfortable with working with cross sections we introduce other data sets to demonstrate seasonality and look for patterns and changes in patterns in the vertical distribution of certain water properties.

This kinetic game has students take a trip through some of the reservoirs in the carbon cycle helps them experience sources and sinks, fluxes, and residence time. This provides an experience for putting basic scientific concepts like photosynthesis and respiration in the context of larger biogeochemical cycles and framing conservation of matter. Understanding the carbon cycle is essential to student understanding of the causes and consequences of climate change.

Students will create water samples with different temperatures and salinities, and then compare their sample with a partner’s in a tank. Once they finish observing the behavior of their samples, they will make some density calculations and explain their observations in terms of density. Discuss as a group what effects changing properties such as temperature and salinity have on water density, and what this means for ocean circulation and habitats.

The Ocean Gazing Podcast CD Volume 1 includes lesson plan materials for middle and high school classes for 9 Ocean Gazing episodes. Additional lessons will come in a future volume.

In the spring of 2010, students in Rutgers University Communicating Ocean Science to Informal Audiences (COSIA) worked with professional educators to develop these lessons and activities about Marine Transportation and Maritime Security related themes.

Students are given information to plan a large exhibit scale aquarium with native species. They must keep in mind what water conditions, such as temperature and salinity, their preferred species require, the feeding habits of species, and the habitat preferences of their chosen fish in designing the tank. (A huge tank with only small benthic fish isn’t so exciting, and the minnows probably shouldn’t go in with the adult bluefish.) Once they have a plan, students must use ocean data to plan their collecting trips by matching each species’ preferred water quality properties to ocean conditions for the day.

COSEE NOW is pleased to present “A plague in air and sea: Neutralizing the acid of progress,” a profile of biological oceanographer Debora Inglesias-Rodriguez, and her work studdying the consequences of ocean acidification. A comprehensive lesson plan is also provided, that leads students through an exploration of the relationship between carbon dioxide and acidification.