Learning about Migration !

Tuesday 4th of May 2016

Migration is a journey that is often over long distances, often a year or once in a lifetime.
Homing is a short trip home after searching for food or mates.

Animals can navigate when migrating & homing through different ways.
Including: Visual Cues/Landscape, Star Compass, Magnetic and Sun Compass.

Visual Cues/Landscape:
- Landmarks, mountains, buildings, roads, forest, streams etc..
- Birds can use motorway etc. while migrating
- Digger wasp used cones as as visual where 'home' was.
- Change of land (development deforestation) may harm navigation & migration




Star Compass:

Using star for navigation.
Scientists put birds in a conservatory/star dome to see if it were really the stars that the birds were using to navigate. So one night the they put stars up in the conservatory lab. They noticed that the birds were hopping to the left side of their cages. The next time they swapped the stars around and the birds were hopping to the right side of their cages, which gave the scientists the idea that birds really do use stars at night to migrate. Turning out lights at night could help the birds see the stars clearly for them to be able to migrate.

Magnetic:
Some animals (eg. pigeons & salmons) have been shown to sense & navigate using the earth's magnetic field. Experiments with magnets on pigeons beaks showed their navigation became confused. So scientist put birds in a cage and had this magnetic technology that you can just switch on and off. Whenever it is switched on the birds would either fly to the left or to the right. When they switched the technology off the birds were shown to just be flying around and not knowing where they're flying to. Scientists also tried test where the magnets that attracted them to the earth's magnetic field were and so they attached some magnets onto their beaks and the birds were shown to be confused about where they're supposed to be flying. And they also found some in their backs.

Sun Compass:
- Sun rises in the east and sets in the west.
- Bees and the waggle dance !
Number of waggle = distance.
Angle of middle = angle to the sun
Bees uses the waggle dance to talk to each other about where their food is. So the number of waggle that the bees do is the distance where the food is away from them. And the angle of the middle is the angle of where the food is to the sun. Just confusing myself right there! haha




So we made posters about all of this and here is mine:

Introducing the NZ God-wit:

As you can see the map on the left shows the distance and stops that the God-wits migrate to and from. Also the map shows how it gets to their destination. The God-wits  are a large group of ling billed, long legged, bar-tailed birds. Their long bills allows them probe deeply in the sand for aquatic worms and mollusks. When god-wits prepare to migrate, they double their weight as the season changes and days get shorter. Because they are not needed for the journey, their stomach, liver and also kidney shrinks. As the journey begins, along the way many birds grow bigger flight muscles. Along the way, many of them stop to rest or to feed. Flying in formation helps them in a way so that they can use the minimum energy along the journey, also by travelling in higher air that is less dense. Some birds are led by experienced birds, and others just migrate on their own for the first time. This is called innate. Innate is a behavior that is not taught, it's in their genes, they all do it the same way and they all do it at the same time. So birds that migrate on its own is an example of innate behavior.

Thank You for reading my blog!
Enjoy the rest of your day
God Bless

Auxin

Hi, All 😃😃

On the last day of March, we had a special visitor. She just came into our class and sat in the back and just observed how we use our netbooks and how useful it is to our learning.  We were so grateful as a class that she learnt something from our little lessons and I'm pretty sure she had fun. But anyways let me get to what I have to actually talk about.

So on Thursday, our first task was shared to us by our Biology teacher. The class of  8 was divided into two groups, 3 boys and 5 girls. We had to watch a video first and then answer the questions that were shared to us by our Biology teacher. When we finish that task we had to make a presentation out of dough.

Here it is:

Attracting Mates

Pheromones.

Pheromones is a chemical that plants and animals releases to change the behaviour of animals around them.

Here is an example of Pheromones:

Silly Sentences for Innate

My silly sentence:

"My offspring were raised away by every single member in my family so it can be 100 times better."

My Biology class were told to write our own silly sentence to try and remember what Innate means.
Innate means that a behaviour or something wasn't practised or learnt. It's just in their genes. For example some birds, when they are born they know which directions to fly. Like if we take away those birds from its parents the birds will already know which way to fly. So it was born with it.

Innate = Born with it, not practised.

Biology Fun

Thank God we are still alive :)

Biology today was fun. 

We learnt new prefixes, we played games to remember those prefixes.

Here they are:

Chemo - chemicals (food)

Gravi - gravity

Hydro - water

Thermo - temperature

Thigmo - touch

Photo - light

Our teacher gave us activities to do on our own, and then we have to draw our own little animal thingy and name it ourselves. We came up with our own responses for it.

So Fiu Wazowski is a type of creature that has only one eye and it lights up every night. It loves the light.

What is the adaptive for the Fiu Wazowski ?

What is its environmental cue ?

Orientation ?

Competition

Today was cool, cause we had to compete against each other for who has the best presentation. lols
Okay here is our Presentation.

Reflection Blog Post about Homeostasis Assessment

First of all I would like to thank the Heavenly Father for guiding all of us in our assessment. It was pretty hard because I didn't really get it. Compared to last year it was harder. lols. even though it was a research. The hardest bit about the assessment was trying to find link it all together and put the diabete type into it. Easiest part was obviously defining what Homeostasis is.

By the way this is our first internal assessment for the year.

2 tips for the Y13 class next year:

- If you're stuck on something ask questions. Ask for help. Don't struggle in silence.

- Listen in class so you don't get stuck. LOL

That's all I've got to say for now. :) 

Laters.

Reliever Time

Today our Biology teacher was not at school, so we had a reliever. To me it's not good for my actual teacher to not be there. Because if my actual teacher is not there, I don't do my work. But I'm trying to learn independently knowing that one day I will have to learn that way in the future. So that means I didn't do any work today! SORRY Miss Wells! :(

Anyways, I'll update my blog and try to recapture what we did last Thursday. :) We also had a reliever last Thursday, but I did half of my work :)

What did we do last Thursday? Ohh right!
We had to look at pictures of students from last year going on a trip to Tongariro. Then we had read the little description Miss Wells wrote under all the pictures. After reading that we were led to a site to learn either osmoregulation or thermoregulation. I chose to learn about osmoregulation. Osmoregulation is the controlling of water content in the body. This is controlled to protect cells by avoiding too much water entering or leaving them. Water content is controlled by water loss from:

• the lungs when we exhale
• the skin by sweating
• the body, in urine produced by the kidneys

Then after learning about the choice we chose, we had to complete a survey testing us to see if we actually learnt something. Also we had to do some work in our Biozone, but I didn't do it because I didn't get it so I did all the online stuff. :)

Thanks!

Task - Treatment

This is what we were doing today in class. Our amazing Biology teacher made a fake hospital admission chart, and we had to fill out the chat as you can see. 

Introduction to Biology

Hi! My name is Rita Fusitu'a. 

I am a Year 13 student currently attending Tamaki College. 

This year I take Biology as one of my options considering my future plans in University. 

The first thing that we are supposed to do in class is to talk about what we know about Diabetes.

Just to let you know that I haven't fully learnt anything about Diabetes, so I'm deeply sorry if anything I mention below is wrong.

 This is just the start of our Biology class and we had to do this.

There are two types of Diabetes that I know of. Type 1 and Type 2.

Type 1 is the type of Diabete that people are born with and have to live the rest their lives with. Type 2 is when some people just eats too much sugar, their diet is not on point, and they just eat too much, most above their forties.

That's all I know about Diabetes. I'm sure some of it is wrong but at least I tried.

Thank You for wasting your time reading this post :)