Aquarium Science High School Class

[GoGreen]

On 3/21/2022 at 1:03 PM, Hobbit said:

Ohhhhhhh boy! I’m a former high school bio teacher and you’ve just totally nerm sniped me. 🤩 If you want to talk details of lesson/curriculum development I am up for basically unlimited discussion about that!

I will probably be taking you up on that.  While I am certified to teach biology, I have only taught physics/chemistry, so having a resources in that field will be helpful. 

On 3/21/2022 at 1:03 PM, Hobbit said:

Will most of your students have had at least one high school bio class already? Or will you be getting some kids pre-bio?'

I honestly don't know the make-up of the kids.  I pitched it as more of an upper level class (meaning post-bio) but we are not allowed to have pre-requisites for our elective classes.  I am having the same problem for the other elective I am starting next year (an astrophysics/astrobiology Star Wars Class) as I don't know the starting level of the students I am going to have. Because of that, I am going to guess half will have had bio and half will have not.    

On 3/21/2022 at 1:03 PM, Hobbit said:

My ideas for curriculum are more geared toward what ties into other high school bio subjects, or what will be useful to them in the rest of their life:

• pH, ions, atoms vs molecules, covalent vs ionic bonds, ionic bonds break in water because of the polarity: basic chemistry if the kids need it.
• The importance of surface area! More surface area of bubbles leads to more dissolved gas. More surface area in a sponge or gravel leads to more places for bacteria to grow. More surface area on a plant means more places to absorb nutrients/gasses and get rid of wastes. More surface area in the gills means the same thing!
• Dissolved gasses. More gas is in solution at a low temperature, less at a high temperature. Versus dissolved solids, which are the opposite. The physics behind why that is.
• Osmosis and diffusion. Especially the mechanics of how a fish exchanges wastes/gasses across the gills. Why freshwater fish can’t live in salt water and vice versa.
• Data collection and interpretation!!! Make them all keep lab notebooks. Have them graph their pH, ammonia, nitrites, nitrates, etc as they’re cycling their tanks.
• Experimental design. Maybe half the class can add fish food during their cycle and half can add ammonia drops. Different fertilizers and how they affect plant growth, different size sponges and how they affect the cycle… never ending possibilities here.
• The variety of reproductive systems!!! Students leave biology thinking everything reproduces like humans do. FALSE! Livebearers, egg layers, egg scatterers, mouth brooders, and so much more. Often it’s the male fish who does the most parental care. This would be a great opportunity to use those “fish facts” cards that someone else suggested, and even have the class do brief presentations. You could even include different systems in snails, because then you get to talk about hermaphroditic creatures.
• Protists!!! When you teach students about the different kingdoms of life, no one ever knows what protists are. But there are tons of them in aquariums, both single celled and multicellular.
• Microscope use. You will have a never ending supply of interesting things to look at under the microscope. Fish eggs, shrimp molts, filter gunk, algae, thin plant leaves, etc.
• You can briefly cover photosynthesis and respiration and how that affects the water chemistry and gas availability over the course of a day (I assume you’re using live plants).
• Of course, ecological principles. How the different parts of an ecosystem work together for balance. You may have to cover energy loss up the food chain if students start wondering why a mom fish can’t just eat her babies and make more and then eat them and survive forever that way. 😅
• How pollution affects aquatic ecosystems. Algae blooms —> no oxygen for the fish, etc. Why there’s a dead zone where the Mississippi flows into the ocean.

Having 80 minutes 5 days a week is both intimidating and amazing. If you want to talk specifics of lesson planning, I’m here for it. 😁

 

So many good ideas.  Thank you and I will probably be talking with you as I get into more specifics!

On 3/21/2022 at 1:03 PM, Hobbit said:

 

As for what to do with the tanks: I think pairing the kids up to set up their real tanks could work well to keep you from having too many fish to get rid of. If you have the space and funding though, you might consider making the groups optional. I’m sure some kids will have strong ideas of what they want and will want to just do it on their own. Plus, then you don’t have the excited kids fighting over who gets to take the aquarium home.

I think that is probably the way I decided to go.  I think I am going to get groups of 2 where 1 person wants the tank and the other doesn't.  If it turns out they both want one, they can both make one but still working in a group.  That way, the testing, documentation,  care, maintenance, etc. isn't thrown off by absences.

On 3/21/2022 at 1:03 PM, Hobbit said:

I’d check with your LFS about which fish they’d be happy to take from you and sell. Probably livebearers like guppies or platys, or maybe shrimp.

That is my next step.  I have pretty good relatively close that I am hoping to talk to soon.  They are always so busy that talking in person is unrealistic and they are slow with emails (again, probably because they are so busy)

On 3/21/2022 at 1:03 PM, Hobbit said:

You can also consider auctioning off the aquariums that students don’t want to take home. If your school or PTO already has some kind of silent auction event, it could be fun to just add the aquariums to that.

In terms of setting up the cycle in each tank: I’d recommend maybe not giving them seeded sponges or gravel, at least at first. Give them a few days or a week to see how the tank struggles without it, and then give them something to jump start things so they can see the change.

[GoGreen]

On 3/21/2022 at 11:35 AM, Odd Duck said:

I have posted some info and pics about this in my 100 G angelfish biotope-ish tank and I’ll link you straight where that part starts here.  Mine is coming along slowly since I deliberately used a slow growing moss that I would need minimal maintenance.  For the students, I would use something faster growing but you would still need 3-4 weeks of moss growth before the tank is filled with water.

Basically, I trimmed moss off pieces I already had growing that I purchased growing on small mats.  I blended it into a slurry with water and gelatin (learn from my mistake and add the gelatin last after you’ve blended the moss in water).  The slurry is painted onto the wood, rock, or foam pieces you want covered.

Then everything must be kept damp.  I did that by floating (make sure to get a floating one so it maintains the right depth for best function) an ultrasonic fogger in a deep bowl I kept filled with water and also sprayed the wood pieces at least a couple times a day.  My work schedule just doesn’t allow spraying many times per day, every day, so fogger for the win.  This is in a 100 G tank, and I have lights on each side, so I kept the lights on for the side away from the moss since it dried out the moss/wood too much to have lights on directly over the moss side.

I used RODI water, but classroom distilled would be fine if you have it.  I did not add any fertilizers since I added the gelatin as a binder and food source and it was on well-aged wood, not stone or foam.  A little micronutrients wouldn’t be a bad thing, but moss thrives with minimal nutrients.

The main goals with the moss slurry are producing lots of growing points for the moss.  Just cutting it triggers only a single growing point at each cut end.  Shredding it gives you thousands of growing points to spread over the entire piece.  It also lets a little moss go a long way and cover a lot of territory.  The downsides are the time it takes before growth is seen and before it looks like nice coverage.

I did a mix of the cut and tie technique and cut and glue technique on this piece (see pics).  The moss was already attached when the snails started biting and cutting the threads at around 2 weeks post-start.  And the moss more quickly looks like “something” vs. my barely visible specks.  But my barely visible specks will eventually give me a more natural look (🤞🏻) by hopefully letting the moss specks prosper where they would have with a natural exposure, eventually more thorough coverage, and good, dense growth (I hope).

 

I think if you want to do tanks that they take home, you will have to limit the species they can select or someone (I would have been this student) will pick something like hummingbird tetras (just for instance) that are nearly impossible to find and very expensive for their size (ask me how I know).  I like @AndreaW’s idea of physically stocking the smaller tank from a set list and virtually stocking a larger tank from an “anything you want” list.  The students could do their own virtual tank and/or a cooperative virtual tank to teach them to work together to find fish that are compatible.

Your set lists can be very generous (there are literally hundreds of possibilities, so narrow it down to just dozens of the most common and popular) and they would still have to research compatibility, but they would be selecting from fish that should be readily available and would make at least decent tank mates despite crazy student selections.  This would mean you could have some small gouramis as centerpiece fish, but they might not be compatible with chili rasboras so they might have to choose between none from “List A” if they want some from “List D”.  Half the fun, right?  Learning about stuff they’re already interested in and making their own choices?

 

 

Pics are from Sep 13, then 26 (only 13 days to some decent attachment), and then finally Oct 19.  I also picked mosses that attach well.  That’s important for long term staying power.  Some mosses like to let loose and drift away.  That’s part of how they propagate.  If moss is sold by clumps, it may not attach well.  If sold on mats, it’s a bit more likely to attach but that’s not 100% a reliable way to judge.  I’ve not seen Fissidens sp sold in clumps, it likes to attach.  But some long strand, more substantial “stem” mosses are sold by the strand but like to attach and would work for a slurry.  Plus they can be trimmed and sold for decent money per strand.  Look for Physcomitrium hookeri, Jungermannia truncata, Fontanalis antipyretica (+ a varietal ‘Gigantea’), Distichophyllum maibarae, or Plagiochilaceae ‘Camaroon Moss’.  All lovely and interesting but not so fast growing to be a pest, but should attach well.  Fissidens sp. are probably the slowest growing of the bunch.  Camaroon is gorgeous and significantly faster growing than most on this list, but not too fast.

This is awesome.  Thank you. 

On 3/22/2022 at 6:00 PM, nabokovfan87 said:

This makes sense to me as well.

I would highly recommend YouTube as a resource for some lessons. As an example for the above, pondguru has a ton of *lectures* on bacteria, filter types, filtration methods, etc. Needless to say there is about 10 years+ of research all over and there is some key items you can pick and choose from.  You can do case studies based on why one tank being shown did or didn't work (as an assignment) and this would give students exposure to many different sources of information, research process, bibliography, etc.

What I thought reading the full post above I was reminded about a topic like pollution, habitat loss, project piaba, collection trips, climate change, but what stuck out to me was one lecture, one day, where the students observe the fish. The behavior of the fish and if it "seems normal" to the students. Why or why not.  Something along the lines of many documentaries I have seen that discuss the value of public aquariums philosophically and the way animals are treated ethically. The cove is a good place to start.

I think the next lesson in this line of thinking is to discuss species that the hobby has saved and why that process is important.  How some species in the future may only be seen because they are kept by hhobbyists

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Piaba

I believe this is someone who has a few species no longer found in the wild. He would also be a good resource when discussing breeding and genetics. Selection for traits and line breeding.

https://youtu.be/PQ5CFQJn1Js

Youtube will definitely be a resource and I like the idea how showing the positives and negatives of the hobby.  I think what a lot of the students would think of as negatives (wild caught fish for example) actually has a lot of positives to it too. 

[GoGreen]

On 3/21/2022 at 11:06 AM, Katherine said:

Could this be 2 different assignments? One where they individually choose stocking with whatever they like, but is only theoretical, and another with groups (assuming you do groups for the actual tanks) where they choose from the list and it actually gets done.

Great idea and one I am definitely going to use. 

[nabokovfan87]

On 3/21/2022 at 8:35 AM, Odd Duck said:

Pics are from Sep 13, then 26 (only 13 days to some decent attachment), and then finally Oct 19.  I also picked mosses that attach well.  

What is that last picture, which plant specifically? If at all possible, I really would like to ask some detailed questions, show you my tanks and try to source that from wherever you got it from (long story, project I've been working on for about 18 months).

@GoGreenone thing to note and just jot down for future possible use. When I was in college one of the final projects for my group (Our major was computer engineering) was using algae as a fuel for energy production.  Let me see if I can find a very cut/dry explanation of the process.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algae_fuel

"Using Algae to make Biodiesel" is essentially what their project was exploring.  Definitely something interesting when we talk about the future of the hobby and how things can help with issues.

[Odd Duck]

On 3/23/2022 at 12:59 PM, nabokovfan87 said:

What is that last picture, which plant specifically? If at all possible, I really would like to ask some detailed questions, show you my tanks and try to source that from wherever you got it from (long story, project I've been working on for about 18 months).

@GoGreenone thing to note and just jot down for future possible use. When I was in college one of the final projects for my group (Our major was computer engineering) was using algae as a fuel for energy production.  Let me see if I can find a very cut/dry explanation of the process.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algae_fuel

"Using Algae to make Biodiesel" is essentially what their project was exploring.  Definitely something interesting when we talk about the future of the hobby and how things can help with issues.

Just for anyone interested (I’ve heard there are often up to 10 people on average interested in the answer to any given  question that gets posted on forums like this) the moss in question is Jade Lotus (Jungermannia truncata).

[Wrencher_Scott]

As someone posted already: Ecological impact of the aquarium trade.

This would be a great thing to teach, especially about the salt water trade. 

[nabokovfan87]

It's been discussed above, but here's a great little video and a great tank / study.  The topic of "how" various types of fish breed and how fry grow or are cared for in various environments (and specifically the "why").  All those good scientific method questions.

Jimmy's tank (he later adds a moss wall to the back and the algae is a bit "better", one of my favorite tanks of his) with his rice fish and showing their method of caring for the fry.