Suggestions Needed!!

[SchoolMarm]

My colleagues and I are establishing tanks in our classrooms for educational experiences. We are looking for suggestions. Our students are grades 8-12, in other words 13 year-olds to 18 year-olds.

In math class, we are doing a fishless cylce and graphing/recording data from our ammonia and nitrite tests to determine when we can add fish. My Algebra II students will use data for calculating the flow rate of the filter.

We have a 55 gallon community (schools of fish observation), a 10 gallon guppy tank (livebearer), a 20 gallon convict tank (egg laying), 20 gallon tiger barb tank (school mascot is the tiger), and soon to be established 75 gallon tank.

Thanks for any ideas! Science, math or other!

 

[HawkEye]

For science you could analyize the bacteria (nitrate/nitrites) under a microscope....I teach phys ed myself so you could also figure out how many miles the fish swim in an hour/day (maybe watch & log for 10 minutes and multiply times 6 for hour)

You may also what to correlate the relation to nitrates/nitrites and algae growth (if you dont have live plants)...if you have live plants then you could do plant growth rate......

I hope this helps...I just pulled these from the top of my head

 

[Kossy]

I'm still a student and I actually got my teacher involved with fish however you could try seeing the bacteria under the water. Do you have a heater? Well if you do you could analiyse how temperature effects the oxygen in the water

 

[ste2k3]

you could use an expeiment i used when doing my A-levels. if you have algaes or plants in there, you plot the ph of the water over a 24hourperiod. as the plants photosynthesise they take in co2 and give off oxygen with the level of co2 going down, the ph rises but at night when the lights go off, the plants will stop photosynthesising and the co2 will build up and co2 being acidic- the ph will crash over night. you can overcome problems like this by having two tanks linked together and reverse lighting them which should balance the ph.

just an idea.

 

[cheirodon]

Tank-wise: Weight, density, Evaporation rate, temperature oscillation max/min/avg, outside-inside temp, PH, ammonia, nitrates, nitries, hardness, and all other water variables. Historic charts from data of period. Watts-Heat ratio, calories exchange.

Fish-wise: Family, name, gender, gegraphical origin, ancestors, general description, growth rate, breeding, feeding, habits, displacement, parts and their names, etc.

Plants-wise: Same as above.

I'm shooting from the hip, but I'm sure people here will be more specific.

I started with fish when I was 11, and quit when I went off to school (and now I'm back!), and I couldn't get enough of it

 

[Kossy]

Well I'm with fish during school

 

[MAM]

how about studying the anatomy of the different fish, how they vary, what allows some to be top swimmers or middle swimmers or bottom dwellers, why fish school, about their colorations and what that does for these fish in a natural habitat.

 

[aquamanis]

Did you know fish are the smartest creatures in the world because they are always in schools!

 

[platypus]

How about using it for evolutionary biology/genetics? Guppies for example have undergone really intensive selective breeding to get their colouration so bright and well defined - yet within a few generations of different colours breeding together they will get all mixed again! You could use this to show how some genes when put together result in a sort of compromise, like fish colouration, and some result in a dominant/recessive pairing, like eye colour in humans. Sorry, I don't know if there are any obvious fish genes that have dominant/recessive alleles!!!

 

[spanky_pp_]

How about using it for evolutionary biology/genetics? Guppies for example have undergone really intensive selective breeding to get their colouration so bright and well defined - yet within a few generations of different colours breeding together they will get all mixed again! You could use this to show how some genes when put together result in a sort of compromise, like fish colouration, and some result in a dominant/recessive pairing, like eye colour in humans. Sorry, I don't know if there are any obvious fish genes that have dominant/recessive alleles!!!

I think this idea is really interesting...

 

[platypus]

I think this idea is really interesting

Honestly?
*runs off to speed-read more of 'The Selfish Gene' so can drop more impressive words like 'allele' into the conversation*

 

[Lithril]

Once you've added you're initial batch of fish to the new tank, leave it a while. You could then add more fish and monitor the ammonia/nitrite and find out the extent new fish increase, whether certain fish increase the levels more and how long it takes the colony of bacteria to grow to compensate the increased levels.

Depending on how heavily planted your tanks are you could also monitor the Nitrate levels and then add some plants and find out how this affects those levels. Does the surface area of the plants affect this?

With different strength lighting you could monitor growth of plants.

Failing that buy some aggro meat eaters and find out how long it takes a student to lose a finger...

 

[SchoolMarm]

All excellent ideas, THANK YOU keep them coming.


Lithril, the principal requested nothing with teeth However, I think it would help get kids in line!!

THANKS

 

[Inchworm]

Hi SchoolMarm,

How about some English lessons? All of the above mentioned activities can lead to interesting writing assignments.

The students can learn to gather data by keeping journals. This information can then be written in a style appropriate for scientific papers, then rewritten for publication in your school newspaper. It can be conveyed via friendly letter, forum post and perhaps even poetry. These all call for different writing styles and vocabulary.

This same data can also serve as inspiration for writing science fiction or fantasy stories. Or, as an exercise in descriptive writing, you might ask your students to try to paint a verbal picture of a planted and populated aquarium.

 

[AquaNut]

What a lovely suggestion, Inchworm. They would surely make a lovely subject for art classes, as well.

Way to go, SchoolMarm! I think it's terrific that you and your colleague are making the effort to do something so interesting with your students. I didn't have trouble understanding science in school, yet I took few science classes because it simply wasn't interesting to me. I'm amazed at how much I now know about biology and chemistry, compliments of my aquaria hobby. Countless times I've thought that it's a shame we never kept aquariums in science class when I was younger; had we done so, I think I may have been more interested in my biology and chem classes.

I think everything about keeping fish is a science lesson. I'm no physicist, but there must be some sort of lesson that works around how the weight of a tank increases in proportion to its dimensions and what sorts of structures are required to support the weight, etc.

Also, how about raising/collecting different live foods? Brine shrimp are a snap, but if you've got access to the great outdoors (I don't know if you're at an inner city school), maybe you could take little excursions outdoors to collect rainwater in a wooded area and see what 'hatches' in it, or visit a local pond. To make it more 'scientific', you could use several buckets containing rainwater, and then buckets with other water (straight from the tap, well water?, dechlorinated, RO water etc) and compare the differences between life forms that appear. Heck, if you find out, let us know as I'd like to know myself! Also, I'm told (haven't tried it yet) that if you place fallen leaves on the surface of a shallow tray of water and leave it in a cool, shady place for a few days, bloodworms will appear on the bottoms of the leaves.

Keep the suggestions coming, everybody! I bet there are other school teachers who will read this thread, and if we come up with lots of great ideas, maybe more classrooms will delve into our amazing hobby to learn more about the world around us all.