Topics for high school biology

[dliviskie]

Looking for ideas to discuss or simple experiments to perform in my high school biology class. We're doing evolution right now, so anything along that line would be good. Any suggestions? Thanks.

[ecoli]

well, if you don't have to do wet work, you can go through published fossil records and compare species... that may be a bit boring though.

 

You can do some microevolution experiments by exposing organisms with short generation times to various environmental pressures. Some ideas would be antibiotics to bacteria or some stress factor to algae...

[dliviskie]

I like that idea of antibiotics to bacteria. It got me to thinking about the discovery of Penicillin. Do you think there is a way to replicate that experiment in a high school setting?

[ecoli]

penicillin was isolated from bread mold... would you try growing bread mold and exposing it to bacteria, and seeing which bacteria survive.

 

You could then take those colonies that survived and replate them to demonstrate that resistance to penicillin is inherited by the daughter cells.

[foodchain]

I think another nifty thing could be attempting to match various vocalizations organisms make to specific organisms.

[Paralith]

if possible, a few rounds of dissections where you compare homologous structures in different animals would be interesting. and you could show how the structures were specialized for each given animal's lifestyle.

[CDarwin]

Wow, it sounds like you actually have one of those "budget" things to work with.

 

I've always wanted to do an evolutionary anatomy dissection-lecture. You dissect some organism and discuss the evolution of each organ and muscle group and what not as you come to it.

[Paralith]

Wow, it sounds like you actually have one of those "budget" things to work with.

 

I've always wanted to do an evolutionary anatomy dissection-lecture. You dissect some organism and discuss the evolution of each organ and muscle group and what not as you come to it.

 

It was a college class - Vertebrate Anatomy and Phylogeny. I never learned so much in one semester. The lab portion consisted of these dissections, though I think my lab teacher didn't go as much into the evolutionary relationships as the other lab teachers did. Still, I learned a lot.

[carol]

you may also use different species of ants and their habits to demonstrate Darwin's Natural Selection.

[Superbug]

It's not an experiment, but one of the coolest examples of evolution is the spread of antibiotic resistance throughout a range of disease causing bacteria (in my some what geeky opinion any way!). It's also a good way of getting the kids of today to realise that the use of antibiotics as if they were candy to be taken for every little cough and sniffle can only mean bad things for mankind. Something scary to do would be to take swabs of various places in the school/home and plate onto agar plates with different antibiotics to see how common antibiotic resistance is.

[pioneer]

One simple experiment can show how important environment was to evolution. One can set up three environments (bowls) one for a fresh water fish, another for brackish water fish and another for a salt water fish. Then you switch the environments to show how their selective advantages don't give them the same level of advantage in another environment. One could put a Panda Bear in a grassy field, but that would mean.

 

Most evolutionary theory uses one common environment. Under the same environmental conditions, selective advantage will result. But this scenario doesn't show how these changes are set by that environment. The brackish water fish, will have the best shot of surviving all three eco-systems. It has the most selective advantage in three environments. The salt or fresh water fish could have a more advanced skills, but only in a single environment. As long as that environment holds firm, they are fine.

 

What this experiment suggests, some evolutionary changes may not have had selective advantage in one environment. But if the animal migrated to a new environment, they could actually find an environment that gives them a new selective advantage. The brackish water fish may get his butt whipped in the ocean or rivers, by the more aggressive fish. But in the brackish water, he is king of the hill.

[ajman2463]

It's not an experiment, but one of the coolest Something scary to do would be to take swabs of various places in the school/home and plate onto agar plates with different antibiotics to see how common antibiotic resistance is.

 

I did this with my 5th grade class that i do hands-on "experiments" with every tuesday. Its also a good high school biology idea, as superbug stated. I still remember doing it in my 9th grade biology class! (and that was years ago!)