Tag: videos

Summer School – Day 9 – Speciation and Pond Water Lab

- Wendy 1 Comment

Today, it was time to leave microevolution behind, and talk about how new species form. Now that they understand how adaptations and natural selection cause populations to change, it’s an easy step to understanding how this can lead to speciation. To drive that concept home, I put together a speciation activity based on this cool online natural selection simulation: http://sepuplhs.org/high/sgi/teachers/evolution_act11_sim.html. 

The simulation tracks populations of birds on an island, to see how natural selection and mutations can cause phenotypic changes. You start with 3 populations of 300 birds each, and follow them through 1,000,000 years of evolution. Throughout this time, the simulation makes a notification any time a mutation takes place, along with the overall effect – was it positive or negative? Did it help to increase, or decrease the population?

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Copeland Creek

- Wendy St. John Leave a comment

This is the stretch of Copeland Creek running through the Sonoma State University campus, right behind the Environmental Technology Center. In nearly 10 years on campus, I’ve never seen Copeland Creek with this much water, or running so fast. It was worth giving my Conservation Biology students a quick break so we could walk down and see the creek, and take a quick video.

SAFE Western Pond Turtle Video

- Wendy St. John 2 Comments

I might be biased, but this is a fantastic video about western pond turtles . . . the segment starting at 5:00 features the field site where I did my thesis research. The fellow being interviewed is my advisor, Nick Geist. And that’s your’s truly measuring the turtles in preparation to release them back into the lake. SO FAMOUS! 🙂

These Crazy Cute Turtles Want their Lake Back

- Wendy St. John 2 Comments

Hey, these are MY turtles! (Well, not just mine, but these are Geist Lab turtles. So I guess I could call them OUR turtles).

“Boxed in by a freeway, a golf course and a neighborhood, it’s a miracle that San Francisco’s Mountain Lake even exists. But not only is the tiny lake—located on the south end of the city’s Presidio park—still there, it now provides one of the few places in San Francisco where visitors can watch California’s only native aquatic turtle bask in the sun.”

Read the rest of the article here: http://ww2.kqed.org/science/2016/01/26/these-crazy-cute-baby-turtles-want-their-lake-back/

Richard Dawkins – Beware the Believers

- Wendy St. John Leave a comment

This is my one of my favorite YouTube videos. The song is catchy, and it’s SO freaking hilarious, especially if you’re familiar with arguments about evolution vs “intelligent design.” This came out, IIRC, around the time of the Scienceblogs kerfuffle about the film “Expelled,” and honestly, I don’t know if it’s meant to lampoon ID creationists or Richard Dawkins and other atheist scientists (including P.Z. Myers and Eugenie Scott who are “featured” in the video) – but it does a great job of poking fun at both sides. Best of all, hip hop Charles Darwin! As someone who identifies as a methodological materialist (but not a philosophical one), I adore this video. Geeky science humor doesn’t get any better than this.