Wednesday 9.8.10

Today in class we started off by talking about the upcoming project involving the pictures. Mr. Paek will assign that sometime next week.   Also make sure you are logged into blogger.

Next we went over the different kinds of consumers. First you have Primary consumers, they feed directly off of producers. They can also be called herbivores. next you have secondary consumers they feed off of the primary consumers. after that you have Tertiary consumers they feed off of secondary consumers. The last type of consumer is quatemary consumers and you guessed it they feed off of  tertiary consumers.

We also went over what is called the pyramid of energy. The pyramid of energy is another way to show the way energy passes through different organisms. on the bottom is producers then primary consumers, then secondary consumers so on and so forth ending with quatemary consumers.  Mr. peak explained that when energy passed to another level of the pyramid it losses 90% of the energy. so producers have a 100% energy but when a primary consumer eats a producer it only gets 10 % percent of that energy. it keep decreasing by 90% all the way down so it goes  100% 10% 1% .1% and .01%. there are two other pyramids called number pyramids and biomass pyramids. number pyramids show the total number of organism in each level. Biomass pyramids show the total number of mass in each level of the pyramid.

For the end of class we worked on pages  15,16,19 and 20 in the pink ecology packets

Homework:   15, 16, 19, 20(whatever you dint finish in class).  Also you can do page 17 in the pink ecology packet for extra credit

Chapter 1.1 - What Is Science?

In chapter 1.1 the main idea about what science actually is. literally science is an organized way of gathering information about the natural world. the book is trying to get us to think of science in a different way. Most of us think of science as a bunch of facts that were thrown together and never change, when actually science is always changing finding new ways to explore things.

There are a few main features of Science . One is that science only deals with the natural world. it does not go into supernatural phenomenon's or conspiracy's. two, scientist collect and organize data in a way in which is easiest to understand. Three, science only deals with evidence not beliefs.

Science is not something that only scientist participate in. you probably engage in science everyday without knowing it. science can be done through many ways. there is not one single way to go about conducting a science experiment but there is one frequently used method and it is called methodology. Methodology is a process in which you first observe and ask questions, then make inferences (which basically means to make an educated guess based on the evidence) and then test your theory's and make a conclusion.

I am not going to go much into detail about independent and dependent variables and qualitative and quantitative data since we have discussed those in class. one thing that the book does go into detail about is drawing conclusion. Conclusion is the last step in any theory or idea that you are testing, and it normally takes many tests and hypothosies before you can come to a conclusion.