This blog post is about my favourite subject – science! The project that this post is about is called “Handle With Care! 🌱”, the very first PLP grade 9 science project of this year. It’s been quite a while since ya’ll last heard from me hasn’t it? I may not be making as many blog posts this year, but I’m trying my best.
This project kept it’s focus on climate change and natural disasters that are causing harm to the planet we call home. For the first little while we focused our attention onto purple sea urchins and how they affect the giant kelp forests. We learned that giant kelp forests are the ideal habitat for purple sea urchins, although not exactly ideal for the giant kelp. The sea urchins are rapidly eating away at the kelp forests, therefore producing more offspring that then continue to devour these giant kelp. Not-so-fun fact: purple sea urchins have eaten away over 95% of these giant kelp forests! We are working hard to slow down this process in every way we might know. Although we are having quite a lot of trouble (which is odd considering how good humans are at killing off species), since the area that this is taking place is.. well… quite exotic one might say – the sea floor! We have figured out that eating the purple sea urchins is the best way that we can slow the devouring of the kelp forests, what part of them do we eat you may ask? Well their gonads of course! Sound delicious am I right…? Well actually, its quite popular in places like Japan, Chile, the Mediterranean, and even the West Coast of the United States! You could have them on toast, you could put them in salad, you could eat them straight up, you could eat them cooked or raw, there are many ways of eating them! I cant say I would try it if I had the choice, but if someone offered me a sea urchin gonad for free, I might give it a go!
One of the first things that we did was create an ecosystem drawing with 5 biotic (living organisms) and 5 abiotic (non-living) features. As an artist myself, you already know that I had to go above and beyond for this! I put all of my artists knowledge and created *drumroll please!* this!!:
After that, we learned a bit about food webs, like how living beings interact with each other in the wild, who get their energy from who, who profits off of who, etc! There’s not much I can say about this but we did create an interactive food web on scratch, if you’re interested in see it, click on the link below 🙂
https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/733049706/
Next up, we have a Bioaccumulation GIF (and it’s GIF, not JIF!!!)! As a prior animator, again I had to put my full effort into this. The simple definition of what bioaccumulation is – is little micro-plastics that typically come from processed food (typically from a factory), yes we are in fact eating plastic with our chips, and yes you have the right to be mad, that come out of our clothes when we wash them on hot (try not to do that unless your clothes have been soaking in the mud or something, they’ll be just as clean if you wash them on cold, than if you wash them on hot), and get flushed into the wild for animals to eat, and then for us to eat – no mater what you do, you’ll always be eating tiny little micro-plastics with a lot of your mean, and processed food. Another reason why we should start trying to eat more fruit and veg! Anyways heres my GIF:
For the next one, the news report. If I’m being completely honest, I didn’t do as much work for this as I could have. My group members were Jupiter, Cameron, and Judah! First thing that we did for this keystone was read about our topic – purple sea urchins and the kelp forests, which was good for me considering how much I had learned about it! Although as mentioned before, I really didnt play a big part in this… all I got to do was pretend to whisper in Cameron’s ear something about sea urchins once we got to filming, which sucked considering the sea urchins were my favourite topic that we worked on in this project 🙁 regardless, the end product looked pretty good, here it is:
And the last assignment, PSA! I have absolutely no clue what it stands for whatsoever but I do know what it was about! This one was probably one of my favourite assignments for this project, it even tops all the artsy assignments! It covered a lot of familiar ground because… we had to make fake instagram posts! I know how to get someone’s attention online, and it shows – because I have over 1,100 followers on my main instagram account, which is actually a HUGE milestone for me, I’ve never had anything over 100 followers on literally any social media platforms I’ve ever been on :,) anyways enough about my instagram (@kai_says_owo go follow me if ya want 👁👁), Cameron was my partner for PSA, (I’ll link the website in which we created these on) we had to create 5 fake instagram posts about all of the topics we had learned about so far in this project. One on The Earth’s spheres, and human impacts on each of them, one on Bioaccumulation/biomagnification, and human impacts on them, one on Local, interconnected, food webs and how humans impact them, one on Local wildlife management practices, and how humans impact them, and finally, one on Nutrient cycles, and how humans impact them. One of the main reasons why this assignment is the one I’m most proud of, is because I did more work than my partner (which is considerably rare for me I won’t lie lol). I did 3/5 of them, and he did 2/5! Anyways here are my 3 fake instagram posts:
(Here’s the website in which we created these fake posts: https://generatestatus.com/generate-fake-instagram-post/)
If I’m being honest, not entirely sure what the driving question is, but once I find out, I’ll give it my best “driving answer” here!
And that concludes this project’s blog post! Thank you to whoever is reading this (more specifically my teachers, as far as I can tell ya’ll are the only ones that tend to read my blog posts lol)! And as always, have a nice day!