In today’s class we continued to discuss two more articles. The first article discussed echolocation in the context of finding and capturing prey. The article gave a brief summary on animals that use this tactic to find and capture their prey. The bat was one of the main examples used. The bat sends out impulses in order to locate different obstacles in its environment as well as potential prey. As the bat gets closer and closer to its prey, the number of impulses per second increase. Just before capturing its prey, the bat discontinues using its biosonar. The main topic of the article was the study of the porpoise and echolocation. They performed an experiment to determine the number of “clicks” the porpoise made when hunting and capturing its prey. As the porpoises get closer and closer to their prey the clicks increase into a buzzing sound. The most interesting thing about the porpoises was that whenever they capture their prey, they don’t stop buzzing. Scientists still do not know why this occurs. The second article talked about coral larvae and their reaction to slight changes in water temperature. They composed an experiment where they took thousands of coral larvae and exposed them to different water temperatures ranging from 27.5-31.5 degrees Celsius. There was a chart that expressed the maturation stages of the larva under the different temperatures. I found it very interesting how very slight changes in temperature could have such a significant impact on the growth of coral. Today we also finished up are dogfish shark dissections. The only thing my partner and I had left was to expose the brain of the shark. Cutting off the top layer of skin was very difficult because there was a lot of cartilage in between the skin and the brain. After about 20 minutes we were able to successfully expose the brain cavity. It was very interesting to look at. Today was another good day of class. One more day of class until we leave for BVI!!!!!!
