Spice up your Science!

Science weeks and festivals are nearly upon us. March is the month when many events take place up and down the country to get children and their families excited about science. Have a look for events around the UK. Find one near you and try to attend it with your family or school. Here is a great link for you http://www.britishscienceassociation.org/national-science-engineering-week .
If you live in Oxfordshire have a look on this site http://www.oxfordshiresciencefestival.co.uk/events/ .Why not host a special science event in your very own school? Science is a fabulous subject and embraces so much. You have Biology, Botany, Entomology, Ecology, Engineering, Physics, Chemistry, Cosmology and Astronomy to name but a few. These are such cool and interesting subjects! Bring science right into your life, get excited, discover and have fun learning!

Historic Horrors!

Parasites come in many forms but the one thing they all have in common is that they have to live off a living host. This relationship is not a good one for the host, who gets nothing from it. A parasitoid can even lead to its hosts death. A parasite is always much smaller than its host. Viruses are parasites as are quite a few invertebrates. There are even parasites that parasitize other parasites - how cool is that?! Tape worm, whip worm, round worm, intestinal fluke and liver fluke are just a few little beauties that can really spoil your day. This little group affect the intestines, lungs, brain, pancreas, liver and appendix between them. In certain countries they are still a problem but in our history they were rife. Human faeces have been dug up from Viking settlement sites in places such as York and they are infested with some of this merry collection. (Worth a visit is the Viking Festival in York 16th-24th Feb 2013 http://www.jorvik-viking-festival.com/ - visit the Jorvik Centre to see some 1000 year old worm invested poo for yourself as well as having a great Viking experience!) Other great little parasites which caused our ancestors some considerable trouble, and are still here with us today but hopefully rather more controlled, are the bedbugs, head lice, body lice and the rather dubious pubic louse. Under the microscope these little chaps are beautifully built for the job of hanging on and sucking blood. Right little historic horrors!

Re-enactments are great practical learning opportunities for children. Brilliant with your school or  just pure family fun!

Brilliant Beetles!

Here are some big numbers for you; 1,400,000 species of animals have been described so far and that is still rising. 800,000 of those are insects. That is a huge number of amazing variations of life - we are not including archnids (spiders), mirapods (millipedes), gastropods (snails) etc here either! I think everyone who likes invertebrates has a favourite order. (When classifying organisms they are broken down in groups until a single species is identified. 'Order' is a taxonomic rank, in our case this is at the point where we are listed as 'Primates'). The great thing is that there are simply so many orders to choose from! My absolute favourite is the Coleoptera order. This order embraces all the beetles. http://www.amentsoc.org/insects/fact-files/orders/coleoptera.html  Coleoptera actually means 'sheathed wing' in Greek which is a pretty accurate description as beetles have an elytra. This is a hard body casing that has evolved from their front pair of wings and now protects their single set of wings underneath. (Not all beetles have wings and not all beetles can fly though just to add a bit of spice). Us humans have had a thing about beetles for a long time. The Egyptians worshiped the Scarab beetle, the Vietnamese win or loose money betting on fighting beetles, over a third of the world eat beetle larvae and in Mexico they even stick gem stones on them and wear them as living jewellery. We know for sure that they were around in the Lower Permian period, a mere 299,000,000 years ago. As more fossils come to light, they might be even older. We also know that the first flowers were around at this time. Simple flowers such as the Magnolias we still have with us today. Bees, butterflies and moths had not evolved yet so guess who was doing the pollinating? Yes it was the beetles and some of them are still extremely important pollinators today. It is pure favoritism I will admit, but there is no getting away from it - beetles are quite simply brilliant!!

                                      What an fantastic mix of shapes and colours
                                                               - something for everyone!

Pins and Paper.

It takes time and patience to properly pin an insect for display. (Please see archived blogs on 'perfect pinning'). Today with a small group of older children, we prepared some dead Malaysian Ghost Grasshoppers. The first pin is pushed gently into the middle (thorax) of the grasshopper. It was carefully placed on a setting board. The setting board itself was a polystyrene square with a narrow trench down the middle. The grasshopper's body was put into this trench so that its wings could be carefully laid out. Pins are not put through the fragile wing, (or any other part of the body), as this would damage them. So acid free paper strips were carefully placed over the out stretched wing and these were then pinned into place. These papers will hold the wings in place while they dry out and set. Each leg was then carefully prized out and pins put either side of each individual one to hold it in place. Finally the antenna were also supported by pins into a position that will display them. Now it is time to wait. The insects have to fully dry out before all the paper and pins can be removed - except the only pin that pierced the body, the very first pin. This central pin is what you hold to move the specimen and it is on this pin, under the body, that you place the insects information. A fabulous morning and brilliant work to be proud of!

A really superbly pinned grasshopper. A pinned insect should be laid out to display the most of its anatomical features for research. This one will now be left to dry and set before being labeled and properly mounted.

Encouraging investigation . . .

Animal bones can have a fascination for us all, especially children. Just think of all the children around the world who are totally absorbed by dinosaur bones. All are desperate to grow up and become palaeontologists- which to be honest, is no bad thing! When I present Natural History roadshows in schools, I often bring with me animal skulls and some of them I choose because they display certain abnormalities. This leads to investigation and encourages the children to ask questions - how did it happen? did it affect the animal in its daily life? was it fatal? etc. We will also look closely at the placement of eyes - why are they in a different setting to our own? Why do deer even have antlers and what are they made from? How do they use them? What happens to them when they loose them? Loads of good investigative questions and its great fun to encourage the children to think. They very often surprise themselves!
Children often recognise a Fallow deer skull with its large antlers but not our other smaller deer species. Even a skull with very small antlers present, (such as a Muntjac), children can often think they are a dog or badger. We have 6 species of deer in the UK but 4 of those species have been introduced. Only the Red and Roe deer are truly native.



Two Muntjac skulls being bleached. Bleaching is part of the cleaning preparations of a skull. The bleach must not cover the antlers as it will remove their colour.

Tracking trails.

Snow changes landscapes and also let's us know a great deal more about what some of our wildlife is up to. All kinds of animals will leave their tracks in snow and this gives us an ideal opportunity to track them. It can be great fun to follow tracks in the snow with your children and see where the animal stopped to feed, defecate or even where it got caught and eaten. Perhaps if you are lucky enough, you can track it right up to its front door! The pattern of the tracks vary according to the animals gait so you can see wether it travelled at speed or not. This also gives you a good opportunity to study the different ways in which animals walk. A fox is almost a single line of pad marks as it puts its hind feet into its fore feet prints. A dog staggers its prints. A badger does the same but its prints are wide, larger and point inwards. Be aware that prints get distorted and become enlarged as the snow melts. A domestic cat print can end up looking like you are on the trail of the Beast of Bodmin!

Fox prints (on the right of the photograph), get quickly muddled with a selection of rabbit and pheasant tracks. I wonder if it got a meal that night . . .

First snow fall!

The Oxfordshire landscape changed dramatically overnight as a thick blanket of snow descended. Excitement was doubled when it was confirmed that all local schools were closed. Firstly there were the farm animals to tend to. Cattle to be brought in and water to be defrosted. Hay had to be taken out to sheep still on the hills and a quick check around all our elderly neighbours. Finally, we could get to the serious stuff of the day - sledging and plenty of hot chocolate. My children wanted to know how we get snow in the first place, so I told them. Snow begins as ice crystals that form a cloud when water vapour freezes around minute solid particles in the middle and upper levels of the atmosphere. The temperatures are well below 0° C. The individual ice crystals gradually bond, forming beautiful snowflakes. Not one is identical and once the snowflakes are heavy enough, they fall silently to the ground. A mixture of chaos and fun ensues.

1. Icicles form where water drips off the thatch roof and freezes again.
2. Teasel seed heads get a layer of fresh snow.
3. My youngest son bringing his Dexter cows back home so it is easier to care for them during the bad weather.
4. Sledging down the Downs - apparently the only reason we get snow!