The animation is finished!!!

After a long friday night of finishing and fine tuning the animation, I then struggled through two days of swearing loudly, and repeatedly at my computer, and youtube, trying to compress the incredibly large file to something small enough for youtube to handle, until finally, on sunday night, the finished product was ready to upload. (Though I have been siting here for nearly half an hour waiting for it to do so...)



Here it is, the long awaited finished product of several strenuous hours of work on my, Cody’s, Steven’s and Steph’s part. We all worked together to write, record and visually express the process that is cellular respiration.

From doing this project, I now have a ridiculously thorough understanding of cellular respiration. I first realized though, that perhaps I was spending too much time on this project, when I had my first dream about the electron transport chain, then the krebs cycle, then woke up all angry because they came in the wrong order.

I also learned a lot about working in a group on such a big project. I have done an animation like this before (photosynthesis), but then I was on my own. Having to work with other people on this was sometimes a challenge, mostly with trying to find times when all four of us could meet long enough to get something done. But except for a little pinch on time towards the end here, we managed to do it pretty well.

The original intent of this project was to put together an informative video about cellular respiration, that was simple enough for a high schooler to understand. As far as the content goes, I would say we were successful. But it was actually way harder than we thought to dumb down some of the steps, without taking away from the overall concept. Because of this, the writing took way longer than any of us expected, and was difficult to do as a group, as all of us had different ways we would word something. Again, we came out all right, but in the future, I think I would try delegating sections to individuals to summarize themselves on their own time, so we could have gotten started with the recording much sooner. The recording was by far the most enjoyable, as each of us now has a whole plethora of sound bites of us swearing after a failed attempt at saying succinate dehydrogenase.

Though the animation is not quite as smooth, and did not come out quite as nicely as I would have liked, I am still quite pleased with it, and I hope that it serves its purpose, and educates some kid out there trying to do his bio homework.

Sturgeon Guard Recap

To start off, I will go over a recap of Chad and my service learning project. That is I will briefly describe what we did and were we went. Our service learning project was Sturgeon Guard. We were working with the Wisconsin Department of Natural resources in their attempt to protect these prehistoric creatures during their long and tough journey up the streams and rivers to bread every spring. These fish are especially vulnerable during this time of the year because of the tremendous strains that are put on them in terms of making the long trek up the river and going through with the acts of spawning. It was our job to see that there were no outside forces tampering with their missions because they are unable to protect themselves. The sturgeons journey up stream is a long one but once they have reached their spawning grounds they will find a fish of the opposite sex and spawn for hours until they have finished then they return to the lake or river system where they had originally came from.
I learned a lot from this experience. It was quite amazing to see such things happening in the wild instead of only hearing about it in lab and lecture. It was interesting seeing it and noticing things that you wouldn’t normally think of. One such thing is the actual act of breading. The sturgeon breed externally which mean that the female release the eggs and then the male releases the sperm on them in the rocks. I had never seen this until this project and it was really cool. The female would appear first and would come up into as shallow of water as she could on top of rocks. The females were normally bigger than the male and averaged between 5 and 6 feet long. Then not long after the male, which was normally between 3 and 4 feet long would swim up right next to her as close as possible. The female would then release her eggs into the water and immediately after, the male would begin to shake violently and releasing his sperm. I’m not sure what the purpose of the shaking was but I would imagine it was to stir up the eggs and the sperm and make sure they fertilize. Then after it was all over with, the two, or sometimes more fish, would drift off into the deeper water only to return minutes later and repeat the process.
It was unbelievable how this project can be applied to bio 160. I could recognize a lot of aspects of reproduction we went over in class and had a much better understanding of the situation prior to getting there because of class. Having done this project, I was able to apply what I had learned in Bio 160 to the real world.

Sturgeon Patrol

The service learning project changed my views on learning. It opened my mind up to a whole new method of acquiring knowledge. Before Bio 160 I have never really done a whole lot of volunteering. Just a couple of hours here and there for school.
What I liked is how the project that I picked related to class. In this project we covered a couple different areas that were discussed in class. One of these areas that the project targeted heavily on was wildlife conservation. While doing sturgeon guard I had the chance to step back and look at the impacts humans have on the world around them. When looking at the sturgeon I can see that without the help of conservationist they might not be around today. With the management of the DNR a healthy population is maintained and people still have the chance to fish for sturgeon. Without the management, the sturgeons are very vulnerable to over harvest by humans and their population would be in jeopardy. I felt that Andy and I helped do our part in conservation by being there and making sure no person decided to harm the vulnerable spawning sturgeon. By volunteering in this field I realized that humans need to realize their impacts in this world and they need to be aware of what they can do to help maintain and improve our world.
Another aspect that we covered during this project was having a chance to witness the biology of animals as we disused in class. One of the most obvious sights was that of the reproduction of fishes. We not only got to see how the sturgeon naturally interacted with one another but we also had the chance to view close up encounters of the actual spawning process. We not only witnessed it, but because of class, we understood what was happening and why the fish acted in such a manner. Besides the sturgeon we also witnessed other wildlife. We saw carp, suckers, ducks, downy woodpeckers, robins, and many more. We even had the chance to hear a beaver slapping its tail on the water at us to warn others of our presence. It was nice to take what we learned from lab and be able to identify all sorts of different animals.
The biggest thing for me personally to get out of the project was to volunteer in a field that I am interested in getting a career in. Being a fisheries major, this project was right up my alley. I had the chance to talk to the wardens on duty about studies being done on the sturgeon and also how the fish act and why. I plan on taking the knowledge acquired and using it when planning for that dream job. Overall I feel this project was a success and I plan on volunteering for this next year.