Search Results for: lter

Data Nuggets + DataClassroom = Digital Data Nuggets

We partnered with DataClassroom to create Digital Data Nuggets! These activities allow your students to easily explore large datasets and make beautiful graphs, develop their data literacy abilities, do statistics, and more. You can start with the pencil-and-paper activity and then launch students into a larger data exploration, or go right to the digital version to have students complete the same activity with a higher level of data literacy exploration.

All Digital Data Nuggets are free to use and can be found on their website within their list of datasets. You can also search which Data Nuggets have a digital counterpart using our Math and Science Concepts table here.

Click here to access Digital Data Nuggets on DataClassroom!

Although DataClassroom offers some paid features, Digital Data Nuggets will always be free. Once you are logged in to DataClassroom, look for the Data Nuggets “DN” logo in the list of datasets. The first time you visit their site you will have to create an account using your email or connecting through Gmail. Once you’re logged in, this link should bring you directly to the table of Digital Data Nuggets.

8.8.19

Digital Data Nuggets on DataClassroom!

We are so excited to announce that we have partnered with our friends at DataClassroom to create new “Digital Data Nuggets“! These activities allow your students to easily make beautiful graphs, develop their data literacy abilities, do statistics, and play with data visuals for free in the DataClassroom tool. Although DataClassroom.com offers some paid features, Digital Data Nuggets will always be available with their free version. Once you are logged in to DataClassroom, look for the Data Nuggets “DN” logo in the list of datasets.

Click here to register a free password at DataClassoom.

Click here for a quick tutorial on making graphs with DataClassroom.

DataClassroom was created by our good friend, Aaron Reedy, a former high school teacher and evolutionary biologist. He developed them as the digital data-tool that he always wished he had when he was teaching in his Chicago Public School classroom. In addition to exploring the Data Nugget datasets, DataClassroom lets students upload their own data, easily create graphs, and even conduct animated chi-square or t-tests when they are ready to move up to null hypothesis testing. Aaron is willing to demo the full DataClassroom tool for any interested teacher or school. You can directly send questions, feedback, or a request for a demo to Aaron at aaron@dataclassroom.com.

Leave a comment below to let us know what you think about Digital Data Nuggets!

1.15.19

Hold on for your life! Part II

In Part I the data showed that, after the hurricanes, anole lizards had on average smaller bodies, shorter legs, and larger toe pads. The patterns were clear and consistent across the two islands, indicating that these traits are adaptations shaped by natural selection from hurricanes. At this point, however, Colin was still not convinced because he was unable to directly observe the lizards during the hurricane.

Still shot of lizard clinging to an experimental perch in hurricane-force winds. Wind speed meter is displaying in miles per hour

The activities are as follows:

Colin was unable to stay on Pine Cay and Water Cay during the hurricanes and directly observe the lizards. To be more confident in his explanation, Colin needed to find out how lizards behave in hurricane-force winds. He thought there were two options for what they might do. First, he thought they might get down from the branch and hide in tree roots and cracks. Alternatively, they might hold onto branches and ride out the storm. If they tried to hold on in high winds, it would make sense that traits like the length of their limbs or the size of their toepads would be important for their survival. However, if they hid in roots or cracks, these traits might not be adaptations after all.

To see how the lizards behaved, Colin needed to design a safe experiment that would simulate hurricane-force winds. He bought the strongest leaf blower he could find, set it up in his hotel room on Pine Cay, and videotaped 40 lizards as they were hit with high winds. Colin first set up this experiment to observe behavior, but he ended up learning not only that, but a lot about how the traits of the lizards interacted with high winds.

To begin the experiment, Colin placed the anoles on a perch. He slowly ramped up the wind speed on the leaf blower until the lizards climbed down or they were blown, unharmed, into a safety net. He recorded videos of each trial and took pictures. 

Featured scientist: Colin Donihue from Harvard University

Written with: Bob Kuhn and Elizabeth Schultheis

Flesch–Kincaid Reading Grade Level = 8.4

Additional teacher resources related to this Data Nugget:

  • This study was published in the journal Nature in 2018. Colin would like to thank his coauthors Anthony Herrel, Anne-Claire Fabre, Anthony Geneva, Ambika Kamath, Jason Kolbe, Tom Schoener, and Jonathan Losos. You can read the paper here.
  • Colin wrote a blog post about his experience. He shares more about the lead-up to the project and how a chance occurrence changed the entire trajectory of his research.
  • Colin also put together a story map with more images and animated gifs of this research.
  • We put together a PowerPoint of images from Colin’s research that you can show in class to accompany the activity.

To engage students in this activity, show the following video in class. This video gives some information on the experiment and Colin’s research.

1.15.19

Hold on for your life! Part I

Anolis scriptus, the Turks and Caicos anole, on Pine Cay.

The activities are as follows:

On the Caribbean islands of Turks and Caicos, there lives a small brown anole lizard named Anolis scriptus. The populations on two small islands, called Pine Cay and Water Cay, have been studied by researchers from Harvard University and the Paris Natural History Museum for many years. In 2017, Colin, one of the scientists, went to these islands to set up a long-term study on the effect of rats on anoles and other lizards on the islands. Unbeknownst to him, though, a storm was brewing to the south of the islands, and it was about to change the entire trajectory of his research.

While he was collecting data, Hurricane Irma was developing into a massive category 5 hurricane. Eventually it became clear that it would travel straight over these small islands. Colin knew that this might be the last time he would see the two small populations of lizards ever again because they could get wiped out in the storm. It dawned on him that this might be a serendipitous moment. After the storm, he could evaluate whether lizards could possibly survive a severe hurricane. He was also interested in whether certain traits could increase survival. Colin and his colleagues measured the lizards and vowed to come back after the hurricane to see if they were still there. They measured both male and female lizards and recorded trait values including their body size, femur length, and the toepad area on their forelimbs and hindlimbs.

Colin was not sure whether the lizards would survive. If they did, Colin formed two alternative hypotheses about what he might see. First, he thought lizards that survived would just be a random subset of the population and simply those that got lucky and survived by chance. Alternatively, he thought that survival might not be random, and some lizards might be better suited to hanging on for their lives in high winds. There might be traits that help lizards survive hurricanes, called adaptations. He made predictions off this second hypothesis and expected that survivors would be those individuals with large adhesive pads on their fingers and toes and extra-long legs – both traits that would help them grab tight to a branch and make it through the storm. This would mean the hurricanes could be agents of natural selection.

Not only did Hurricane Irma ravage the islands that year, but weeks later Hurricane Maria also paid a visit. Upon his return to Pine Cay and Water Cay after the hurricanes, Colin was shocked to see there were still anoles on the islands! He took the measurements a second time. He then compared his two datasets from before and after the hurricanes to see if the average trait values changed.

Featured scientist: Colin Donihue from Harvard University

Written with: Bob Kuhn and Elizabeth Schultheis

Flesch–Kincaid Reading Grade Level = 9.9

Additional teacher resources related to this Data Nugget:

  • This study was published in the journal Nature in 2018. Colin would like to thank his coauthors Anthony Herrel, Anne-Claire Fabre, Anthony Geneva, Ambika Kamath, Jason Kolbe, Tom Schoener, and Jonathan Losos. You can read the paper here.
  • Colin wrote a blog post about his experience. He shares more about the lead-up to the project and how a chance occurrence changed the entire trajectory of his research.
  • Colin also put together a story map with more images and animated gifs of this research.
  • We put together a PowerPoint of images from Colin’s research that you can show in class to accompany the activity.

To engage students in this activity, show the following video in class. This video gives some information on the experiment and Colin’s research. For Part I stop the video at minute 1:30.

1.7.19

All washed up? The effect of floods on cutthroat trout

The activities are as follows:

Mack Creek, a healthy stream located within the old growth forests in Oregon. It has a diversity of habitats because of various rocks and logs. This creates diverse habitats for juvenile and adult trout.

Streams are tough places to live. Fish living in streams have to survive droughts, floods, debris flows, falling trees, and cold and warm temperatures. In Oregon, cutthroat trout make streams their home. Cutthroat trout are sensitive to disturbances in the stream, such as pollution and sediment. This means that when trout are present it is a good sign that the stream is healthy.

Floods are very common disturbances in streams. During floods, water in the stream flows very fast. This extra movement picks up sediment from the bottom of the stream and suspends it in the water. When sediment is floating in the water it makes it harder for fish to see and breathe, limiting how much food they can find. Floods may also affect fish reproduction. If floods happen right after fish breed and eggs hatch, young fish that cannot swim strongly may not survive. Although floods can be dangerous for fish, they are also very important for creating new habitat. Floods expand the stream, making it wider and adding more space. Moving water also adds large boulders, small rocks, and logs into the stream. These items add to the different types of habitat available. 

A cutthroat trout. It is momentarily unhappy, because it is not in its natural, cold Pacific Northwest stream habitat.

Ivan and Stan are two scientists who are interested in whether floods have a large impact on the survival of young cutthroat trout. They were worried because cutthroat trout reproduce during the spring, towards the end of the winter flood season. During this time juvenile trout,less than one year old, are not good swimmers. The fast water from floods makes it harder for them to survive. After a year, juvenile trout become mature adults.These two age groups live in different habitats. Adult trout live in pools near the center of streams. Juvenile trout prefer habitats at the edges of streams that have things like rocks and logs where they can hide from predators. Also, water at the edges moves more slowly, making it easier to swim. In addition, by staying near the stream edge they can avoid getting eaten by the adults in stream pools.

Ivan and Stan work at the H.J. Andrews Long Term Ecological Research site. They wanted to know what happens to cutthroat trout after winter floods. Major floods occur every 35-50 years, meaning that Ivan and Stan would need a lot of data. Fortunately for their research they were able to find what they needed since scientists have been collecting data at the site since 1987!

To study how floods affect trout populations, Ivan and Stan used data from Mack Creek, one of the streams within their site. They decided to look at the population size of both juvenile and adult trout since they occupy such different parts of the stream. For each year of data they had, Ivan and Stan compared the juvenile and adult trout population data, measured as the number of trout, with stream discharge, or a measure of how fast water is flowing in the stream. Stream discharge is higher after flooding events. Stream discharge data for Mack Creek is collected during the winter when floods are most likely to occur. Fish population size is measured during the following summer each year. Since flooding can make life difficult for trout, they expected trout populations to decrease after major flooding events.

Featured scientists: Ivan Arismendi and Stan Gregory from Oregon State University. Written by: Leilagh Boyle.

Flesch–Kincaid Reading Grade Level = 7.5

Additional teacher resource related to this Data Nugget:

10.30.18

Data Nuggets on social media!

If you’re not following Data Nuggets on social media yet, you should! We have four great ways to keep up to date about the newest Data Nuggets released and when we add new features:

First, follow us on Twitter @Data_Nuggets. We post new Data Nuggets, cool articles, and supplemental materials that can be used to dive deeper into the research in our activities.

Next, like our page on Facebook and join the new Data Nuggets group. We created this group as a space for teachers, professors, and all educators to discuss Data Nuggets and their experiences using them. Have a new innovative way that you modified a lesson and made it your own? Need suggestions for activities that can be used to teach a particular math or science concept?

Finally, you can follow our new Instagram account Data_Nuggets where we share cool images that come in from scientists when they create their Data Nuggets and photos from our conferences and workshops. You can also subscribe to our YouTube channel where we share scientists’ videos. These are two great places to search for inspiration, or to use to connect more with the people behind the data.

Thanks! Melissa and Liz

8.15.18

Are forests helping in the fight against climate change?

Bill setting up a large metal tower in Harvard Forest in 1989, used to measure long-term CO2 exchange.

The activities are as follows:

As humans drive cars and use electricity, we release carbon in the form of carbon dioxide (CO2) into the air. Because CO2 helps to trap heat near the surface of the earth, it is known as a greenhouse gas and contributes to climate change. However, carbon is also an important piece of natural ecosystems, because all living organisms contain carbon. For example, when plants photosynthesize, they take CO2 from the air and turn it into other forms of carbon: sugars for food and structural compounds to build their stems, roots, and leaves. When the carbon in a living tree’s trunk, roots, leaves, and branches stays there for a long time, the carbon is kept out of the air. This carbon storage helps reduce the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. However, not all of the CO2 that trees take from the air during photosynthesis remains as part of the tree. Some of that carbon returns to the air during a process called respiration.

Another important part of the forest carbon cycle happens when trees drop their leaves and branches or die. The carbon that the tree has stored breaks down in a process called decomposition. Some of the stored carbon returns to the air as CO2, but the rest of the carbon in those dead leaves and branches builds up on the forest floor, slowly becoming soil. Once carbon is stored in soil, it stays there for a long time. We can think of forests as a balancing act between carbon building up in trees and soil, and carbon released to the air by decomposition and respiration. When a forest is building up more carbon than it is releasing, we call that area a carbon sink, because overall more CO2 is “sinking” into the forest and staying there. On the other hand, when more carbon is being released by the forest through decomposition and respiration, that area is a carbon source, because the forest is adding more carbon back into the atmosphere than it is taking in through photosynthesis.

In the 1990s, scientists began to wonder what role forests were having in this exchange of carbon in and out of the atmosphere. Were forests overall storing carbon (carbon sink), or releasing it (carbon source)? Bill is one of the scientists who decided to explore this question. Bill works at the Harvard Forest in central Massachusetts, a Long-Term Ecological Research site that specializes in setting up big experiments to learn how the environment works. Bill and his team of scientists realized they could measure the CO2 coming into and out of an entire forest. They built large metal towers that stand taller than the forest trees around them and use sensors to measure the speed, direction, and CO2 concentration of each puff of air that passes by. Bill compares the CO2 in the air coming from the forest to the ones moving down into the forest from the atmosphere. With the CO2 data from both directions, Bill calculates the Net Ecosystem Exchange (or NEE for short). When more carbon is moving into the forest than out, NEE is a negative number because CO2 is being taken out of the air. This often happens during the summer when trees are getting a lot of light and are therefore photosynthesizing. When more CO2 is leaving the forest, it means that decomposition and respiration are greater than photosynthesis and the NEE is a positive number. This typically happens at night and in the winter, when trees aren’t photosynthesizing but respiration and decomposition still occur. By adding up the NEE of each hour over a whole year, Bill finds the total amount of CO2 the forest is adding or removing from the atmosphere that year.

Bill and his team were very interested in understanding NEE because of how important it is to the global carbon cycle, and therefore to climate change. They wanted to know which factors might cause the NEE of a forest to vary. Bill and other scientists collected data on carbon entering and leaving Harvard Forest for many years to see if they could find any patterns in NEE over time. By looking at how the NEE changes over time, predictions can be made about the future: are forests taking up more CO2 than they release? Will they continue to do so under future climate change?

Featured scientist: Bill Munger from Harvard University. Written by: Fiona Jevon.

Flesch–Kincaid Reading Grade Level = 10.5

Additional teacher resource related to this Data Nugget:

  • There are several publications based on the data from the Harvard Forest LTER. Citations below:
    • Wofsy, S.C., Goulden, M.L., Munger, J.W., Fan, S.M., Bakwin, P.S., Daube, B.C., Bassow, S.L. and Bazzaz, F.A., 1993. Net exchange of CO2 in a mid-latitude forest. Science, 260(5112), pp.1314-1317.
    • Goulden, M.L., Munger, J.W., Fan, S.M., Daube, B.C. and Wofsy, S.C., 1996. Exchange of carbon dioxide by a deciduous forest: response to interannual climate variability. Science, 271(5255), pp.1576-1578.
    • Barford, C.C., Wofsy, S.C., Goulden, M.L., Munger, J.W., Pyle, E.H., Urbanski, S.P., Hutyra, L., Saleska, S.R., Fitzjarrald, D. and Moore, K., 2001. Factors controlling long-and short-term sequestration of atmospheric CO2 in a mid-latitude forest. Science, 294(5547), pp.1688-1691.
    • Urbanski, S., Barford, C., Wofsy, S., Kucharik, C., Pyle, E., Budney, J., McKain, K., Fitzjarrald, D., Czikowsky, M. and Munger, J.W., 2007. Factors controlling CO2 exchange on timescales from hourly to decadal at Harvard Forest. Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences, 112(G2).
    • Wehr, R., Munger, J.W., McManus, J.B., Nelson, D.D., Zahniser, M.S., Davidson, E.A., Wofsy, S.C. and Saleska, S.R., 2016. Seasonality of temperate forest photosynthesis and daytime respiration. Nature, 534(7609), p.680.
  • Our Changing Forests Schoolyard Ecology project – Do your students want to get involved with research monitoring carbon cycles in forests? Check out this hands-on field investigation, led by a team of Ecologists at Harvard Forest. Students can contribute to this study by monitoring a 20 meter by 20 meter plot in a wooded area near their schools.
  • Video showcasing 30 years of research at the Harvard Forest LTER
  • A cool article about the diversity of research being done at Harvard Forest – Researchers blown away by hurricane simulation
  • Additional images from Harvard Forest, diagrams of NEE, and a vocabulary list can be found in this PowerPoint.

Permitted Uses

Data Nuggets were co-founded by Drs. Elizabeth Schultheis and Melissa Kjelvik, the Data Nuggets team. The Data Nuggets team maintains the copyright for all the activities and associated materials on this website. Use of Data Nuggets activities and materials must conform to our policies and restrictions, which we detail on this page. Please note:

  • We do not allow posting of content found within Data Nuggets activities, Teacher Guides, templates, or any other associated materials on other publicly accessible or commercial websites.
  • Scientists and other individuals who co-create Data Nuggets along with the Data Nuggets team maintain all rights and permissions for their data and images included in activities.
  • Violations of our policies will be investigated and pursued.

Permissions

As the copyright holder, Data Nuggets encourages use of our materials for educational and not-for-profit use by individual educators, professional development providers, researchers, and administrators. In most cases, the use of Data Nuggets falls under standard usage and does not require permissions. However, there are non-standard cases where permission is necessary. Below we clarify our distinction between standard usage and non-standard usage.

Standard Usage

Standard usage of Data Nuggets means that you do not need to contact us for permission. In order to fall into this category, each of the following conditions must be met. Failure to meet any of these criteria means that usage is considered non-standard. To be standard, usage must be:

  • Educational
  • Non-profit
  • In print format, or on a password-protected website on your school’s intranet or on a course management system, which only the teacher and students can access. In cases of professional development (PD) training, similar organizational sharing is acceptable if limited to the PD provider and participants.

The following are typical examples of standard usage.

  1. Teaching materials: Educators may use our activities in their classrooms in accordance with “fair use” guidelines without seeking our permission. This includes modification of materials to fit a classroom setting, including personalization of activities for students. Data Nuggets are available on our website in PDF format, but are available as Microsoft Word documents upon request. When activities are used, the featured scientists in the activity and the Data Nuggets program should be acknowledged as the source.
  2. Professional development (PD): We encourage PD providers to use our materials to train educators as a component of not-for-profit PD offerings. This includes training provided within districts or educational organizations and projects. We also encourage the use of our materials to facilitate training for scientists and researchers, regarding the communication of scientific research to broad audiences.
  3. Educational conference: We are happy to have educators disseminate Data Nuggets at educational conferences by including them in their workshops and talks. If you plan an event where you’ll be using Data Nuggets, let us know and we can help disseminate!

Non-Standard Usage

All other uses of Data Nuggets we consider to be non-standard usage and requires our formal permission before proceeding. To request permission, please email Elizabeth Schultheis and Melissa Kjelvik at datanuggetsK16@gmail.com. In most cases we will allow the usage of materials and we will email you a response quickly and let you know if any additional information is required.

Examples of non-standard usage includes but is not limited to:

  1. Inclusion of material in a commercial text book.
  2. Use of Data Nuggets as assessments for students at the district or state level.
  3. Use of Data Nuggets for research purposes where data collection occurs. This includes data collection intended for publication in the science education literature, or for use by districts and administrators to track students performance.
  4. Posting of Data Nuggets materials on any website other than https://datanuggets.org

Restrictions and Limitations

Student versions of Data Nuggets are hosted on our website and may not be re-posted on other publicly accessible websites or databases. We strictly control the access to the Teacher Guides associated with each Data Nuggets activity. Teachers, instructors, PD providers, and administrators may download our Teacher Guides after requesting permission by filling out a short form that can be found here. Teacher Guides serve both as answer keys, as well as provide educators with additional notes, teaching tips, and links to additional resources. The use of Teacher Guides is restricted to the standard usage guidelines described above. Reproduction of our notes or answer keys in any form is prohibited without our written permission.

Copyright

Copyright for all Data Nugget activities is held by the Data Nuggets team. To determine whether you need our permission to use materials, see our Permissions section above.

Featured scientists and researchers maintain all rights and permissions to the data and images found in our activities or on our website. Data Nuggets use datasets with direct permission from their sources. All reproduction or hosting of data is prohibited without written permission from Data Nuggets or the scientists directly. Data Nuggets are often based on ongoing or recently completed research, and therefore many of these datasets are not yet published or in the public domain. When data is available through other sources, please follow the guidelines put forth by that institution. For example, some datasets are available in the public domain through repositories, such as Dryad, or networks, such as the LTER. Dryad’s policies can be found here. LTER’s policies can be found here.

Images on our website are either owned by Data Nuggets, used with direct permission from their sources, believed to be in the public domain, or incorporated into our activities according to “fair use” guidelines. Images will occasionally have their sources acknowledged in their captions when expressly requested by the featured scientists. To request the use of an image, please contact us directly.

5.11.18

Bringing back the Trumpeter Swan

Joe with a Trumpeter Swan.

The activities are as follows:

The Kellogg Bird Sanctuary was created in 1927 to provide safe nesting areas for waterfowl such as ducks, geese, and swans. During that time many waterfowl species were in trouble due to overhunting and the loss of wetland habitats. One species whose populations had declined a lot was the Trumpeter Swan. Trumpeter swans are the biggest native waterfowl species in North America. At one time they were found across North America, but by 1935 there were only 69 known individuals in the continental U.S.! The swans were no longer found in Michigan.

The reintroduction, or release of a species into an area where they no longer occur, is an important tool in helping them recover. In the 1980s, many biologists came together to create a Trumpeter Swan reintroduction plan. Trumpeter Swans in North America can be broken up into three populations – Pacific Coast, Rocky Mountain, and Interior. The Interior is further broken down into Mississippi/Atlantic and High Plains subpopulations. Joe, the Kellogg Bird Sanctuary manager and chief biologist, wrote and carried out a reintroduction plan for Michigan. Michigan is part of the Mississippi/Atlantic subpopulation. Joe and a team of biologists flew to Alaska in 1989 to collect swan eggs to be reared at the sanctuary. After two years the swans were released throughout Michigan.

The North American Trumpeter Swan survey has been conducted approximately every 5 years since 1968 as a way to estimate the number of swans throughout their breeding range. The survey is conducted in late summer when young swans can’t yet fly but are large enough to count. Although the surveys are conducted across North America, the data provided focuses on just the Interior Population, which includes swans in the High Plains and Mississippi/Atlantic Flyways.

Featured scientist: Wilbur C. “Joe” Johnson from the W.K. Kellogg Bird Sanctuary. Written by: Lisa Vormwald and Susan Magnoli from Michigan State University.

Flesch–Kincaid Reading Grade Level = 11.5

Additional teacher resource related to this Data Nugget:

A video on Trumpeter Swan reintroduction efforts that could be shown before the Data Nugget to engage students with the topic, or after to expand the research beyond the one study:

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11.2.17

When whale I sea you again?

Image of a humpback whale tail from the Palmer Station LTER. Photo credit Beth Simmons.

The activities are as follows:

People have hunted whales for over 5,000 years for their meat, oil, and blubber. In the 19th and 20th centuries, pressures on whales got even more intense as technology improved and the demand for whale products increased. This commercial whaling used to be very common in several countries, including the United States. Humpback whales were easy to hunt because they swim slowly, spend time in bays near the shore, and float when killed.  Before commercial whaling, humpback whales were one of the most visible animals in the ocean, but by the end of the 20th century whaling had killed more than 200,000 individuals.

Today, as populations are struggling to recover from whaling, humpback whales are faced with additional challenges due to climate change. Their main food source is krill, which are small crustaceans that live under sea ice. As sea ice disappears, the number of krill is getting lower and lower. Humpback whale population recovery may be limited because their main food source is threatened by ongoing ocean warming.

One geographic area that was over-exploited during times of high whaling was the South Shetland Islands along the Western Antarctic Peninsula (WAP). The WAP is in the southern hemisphere in Antarctica. Humpback whales migrate every year from the equator towards the south pole. In summer they travel 25,000 km (16,000 miles) south to WAP’s nutrient-rich polar waters to feed, before traveling back to the equator in the winter to breed or give birth. Today the WAP is experiencing one of the fastest rates of regional climate change with an increase in average temperatures of 6° C (10.8° F) since 1950. Loss of sea ice has been documented in recent years, along with reduced numbers of krill along the WAP.

Logan is a scientist who is studying how humpback whales are recovering after commercial whaling. Logan’s work helps keep track of the number of whales that visit the WAP in the summer. He also determines the sex ratio, or ratio of males to females, which is important for reproduction. The more females in a population compared to males, the greater the potential for having more baby whales born into the next generation. Logan predicts there may be a general trend of more females than males along the WAP as the season progresses from summer to fall. Logan thinks that female humpback whales stay longer in the WAP because they need to feed more than males in order to have extra nutrients and energy before they birth their babies later in the year. This extra energy will be needed for their milk supply to feed their babies.

The Palmer LTER station when Logan and others scientists live while they conduct research on whales.

Humpback whales only surface for air for a short period of time, making it difficult to determine their sex. In order to identify surfacing whales as female or male, scientists need to collect a biopsy, or a sample of living tissue, in order to examine the whale’s DNA. Logan worked with a team of scientists at Oregon State University and Duke University to engineer a modified crossbow that could be used to collect samples. Logan uses this crossbow to collect a biopsy sample each time they spot a whale. To collect a sample, Logan aims the crossbow at the whale’s back, taking care to avoid the dorsal fin, head, and fluke (tail). He mounts each arrow with a 40mm surgical stainless steel tip and a flotation device so the samples will bounce off the whale and float for collection. The samples are then frozen so they can be stored and brought back to the lab for analysis. Logan also takes pictures of each whale’s fluke because each has a pattern unique to that individual, just like the human fingerprint. Additionally, at the time of biopsy, Logan records the pod size (number of whales in the area) and GPS location.

Logan’s data are added to the long-term datasets collected at the WAP. To address his question he used data from 2010-2016 along the WAP and other feeding grounds. Logan’s data ranges from January to April because those are the months he is able to spend at the research station in the WAP before it gets too cold. Logan has added to the scientific knowledge we have about whales by building off of and using data collected by other scientists.

Featured scientist: Logan J. Pallin from Oregon State University. Written by: Alexis Custer

Flesch–Kincaid Reading Grade Level = 10.7

Additional teacher resources related to this Data Nugget:

  • To see more images of humpback whales, and the Palmer Research Station in the WAP where Logan works, check out this PowerPoint. This can be shared with students in class after they read the Research Background and before they move on to the data.
  • More data from this region can be found on the DataZoo, Palmer LTER’s online data portal. To access data on this portal, follow instructions found on this “cheat sheet”. For files that have been compiled for educators, check out this Google Drive folder.
  • For his research, Logan has traveled to United States Antarctic Programs’ Palmer Research Station on the WAP during the austral summer and fall and will be departing again for the WAP in January 2018. He is part of a team of scientists interested in Palmer Long Term Ecological Research, which is funded through the National Science Foundation, documenting changes on in the Antarctic ecosystem.
  • For more information on whale research at Palmer Station LTER and the WAP, check out this website.
  • For additional classroom activities dealing with Palmer Station LTER data, check out this website.
  • The International Whaling Commission (IWC) was created in
    1946 in Washington D.C. in hopes to provide conservation to whale stocks around the world. In 1982, the IWC placed a moratorium on commercial whaling. Fore more information on the IWC and humpback whales, check out their website.

About Logan: Logan is interested in determining how humpback whales are recovering after commercial whaling. Logan first got interested in working with marine mammals when he was an undergraduate student at Duke University and had the opportunity to work as a field technician on a project with some scientists at Duke. He quickly realized this was what he wanted to do and that studying humpbac whales was particularly interesting as they appear to have all rebounded quite heavily in the Southern Hemisphere. Assessing why this recovery was happening so fast and why now, was something Logan really wanted to look at. After graduating from college, he continued to work with marine mammologists as a graduate student to receive his Masters in Science from Oregon State University. In the fall of 2017, he started his work on a PhD from University of California, Santa Cruz continuing asking questions and learning more about whales around Antarctica.
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