Middle and High School … from a Montessori Point of View
It’s remarkable how interest drives motivation and motivation gets things done. We’re in an intercession right now and ten students signed up with me to do a biological survey of the school grounds. With a small creek on one side, and a fairly tall ridge on the other, the school has a nice variety of biomes.
Now, to be clear, I’m not a biologist. In fact, that’s why I was so interested in the biological survey. Everything in this area is new to me. But it also means that I approached this project as a novice. Mrs. E. was nice enough to lend me a veritable library of reference books, covering everything from the wildflowers of Missouri to the amphibians of the mid-West, but she was off teaching another batch of students how to cook, so I was on my own.
All the students in the group were volunteers, but a fair chunk of them just wanted to get outside, even though it was overcast and threatening rain. To get the students more engaged I let them choose either the environment they’d like to survey, or the types of organisms they’d like to specialize in. I also gave them the option of working independently or in pairs.
One pair choose to canvas the small creek that runs past the school. I’d set a minnow trap the night before to collect fish for our tank, and they hauled that in. The stream water was somewhere around 14°C, while our tank was closer to 23°C, so, to prevent the fish from going into thermal shock, we left the minnows in a bucket so it could, slowly, thermally equilibrate. They monitored the temperature change with time, and I think I’ll use their data in my physics and calculus classes.
They also collected a pair of amphibians, which we photographed and then released. They tried to catch some crawfish, but were unsuccessful, despite the fact that one of them searched for “how to catch crawfish” on their phone; unfortunately they did not have time to follow the detailed video instructions they found on the web that described, in detail, how to build a crawfish trap.
Because of the incipient rain, we did not take our reference books out with us. Instead, we collected leaves and sketched bark patterns so we could do our floral identification later.
A number of students really got into that. So we have a fairly large collection, though almost all of which come from the riparian area that bounds the creek. I would have liked a broader survey, but we only had so much time.
More than a few students were interested in looking for mushrooms – even one of the tree specialists came back a mushroom sample – but one student really got into it, canvasing all the dead logs from the creek, through the meadow, and up past the treeline on the side of the hill.
And we now have quite the collection of fungi. They’re as yet unidentified, but they’re elegant bits of biota. Our fungi specialist is interested in coming back in and sketching them.
We had two hours. Not even enough time to do a complete survey, so we barely got started on identification. It will probably go slowly.
While our methods were not systematic, and our coverage of the grounds incomplete, this exercise was a good start to cataloging the local biology. I don’t know if I’ll be able to expand on the survey any time soon, but this type of project would be a great for middle school science next year when we focus more on the biological sciences, particularly on taxonomy.
We ran into this young tarantula on the path between the Zambian and Thai houses in Heifer International’s global village in Arkansas. We were taking the tour, and while this young fellow (probably male according to Zaq our guide) was not part of the regular schedule, we were lucky to find him. While tarantulas are venomous (mildly), and some have stinging hairs, their bites are about as painful as a bee sting (Warriner, 2011). But they are large, and, since most of us have a visceral fear of large arachnids, they’re pretty awesome to encounter (charismatic megafauna – is the term I like to use).
Tarantulas arrived in Arkansas about 8000 years ago (Warriner, 2011) at the height of the warmer, drier climate that followed the melting of the great North American glaciers about 10,000 years ago. The climate of Arkansas has gotten a bit wetter since then, but the spiders survive in isolated, drier upland areas (according to the Arkansas Tarantula Survey), like bits of grassland surrounded by forest. Pretty much like the grassy slope between the Thai and Zambian houses in the global village.
They can live to be 10-20 years old, which I think is pretty impressive for a spider.
Tarantulas usually just hang out at the mouth of their burrow and ambush anything that looks like prey to them. This includes insects and other spiders, but sometimes even lizards and very small mammals.
Identifying tarantula species is apparently difficult because their differences are usually quite subtle. The Arkansas chocolate tarantula (Aphonopelma hentzi), “is presumed to be Arkansas’ only tarantula species” (Barnes, 2002).
If you annoy them (with something like the Wooden Spoon of Silence) tarantulas will rear up and look menacing. Which is pretty awesome.
Maggie E. has a wonderful eye for spotting small fauna. She found this mason wasp (Monobia quadridens) while we were weeding the Heifer Ranch’s herb garden. It had caught this caterpillar and was trying to take off with it. It was a difficult job – the caterpillar probably weighed as much as the wasp – but it finally managed to take it away.
According to the Atlas of Vespidae, these wasps prey on small moth caterpillars. Which is probably why they are usually found in open habitats with flowers; hence the herb garden.
They also use caterpillars to feed their larvae (Wikipedia, 2011). They’ll lay an egg in a cell of their nest and stick a paralyzed beetle larvae, spider or caterpillar in with the egg to feed the wasp larvae when it hatches.
Identifying these wasps was not too hard. The first image in the google search for “wasp caterpillar” looked just like the bug we found, carrying almost the same type of caterpillar.
The image was from the wonderful “What is that bug?” where you can send in bug pictures and the author (Daniel Marlos) will try to identify them.
What’s That Bug referenced the BugGuide which gives the full taxonomic classification and a lot of information about habitat, food and life cycle that’s in an easily readable form.
The BugGuide, in turn, cites some of the more serious resources – books and such. But it turns out that an excellent reference for the wasps (Vespidae) of northern and eastern North America is available online. It’s the Identification Atlas of the Vespidae (Hymenoptera, Aculeata) of the northeastern Nearctic region (Buck et al., 2008).
The Atlas is hosted on another excellent resource, the Canadian Journal of Arthropod Identification, which is a web-based journal dedicated to documenting Canadian arthropods.
