Insect Ecology @ Au Sable - spring 2024

By: Beth Phillips, Kasey Throgmorton, and Hunter Baskett Just a short forty minute drive down the highway, a few turns, and after you park, you will arrive at the Sam Noble Museum of Natural History! This museum has millions awesome organisms to check out, and it is definitely worth the drive. Lucky for us, we got a behind-the-scenes tour and were shown around the entire Invertebrate floor by an entomologist. While on our tour, we were given free range to observe and take note of anything we preferred, so here are some of the few things we were interested in! Enjoy, bug lovers... This Sam Noble Museum of Natural History’s recent invertebrates collection holds over 500,000 specimens and over 280,000 of those specimens have been catalogued on internet databases for research. They still haven’t been through EVERYTHING, but they believe their oldest specimen dates back to the year 1898. While the collection holds specimens from over 100 countries, much of the collect s...

Isopod Colonies in Kindergarten Schools Aaron Ward & Zachary Peterson       “You can teach a student a lesson for a day; but if you can teach him to learn by creating curiosity, he will continue the learning process as long as he lives.” - Clay P. Bedford Educating children to be scientifically interested and minded is one of the most important and difficult duties we as human adults have to ensure the future advances of our scientific knowledge. A recent study published as an article in the peer reviewed journal  Science Education  suggests that a child’s interest in science at the age in which they are in a kindergarten environment is a great predictor for the child’s interest in science and higher scientific self-concepts later in childhood. In other words, if a child shows interest in science at an early age, it is a good indicator that they will enjoy and be good at science in the future. Therefore, we must identify those students who ...