(Other skill sessions include learning bird songs from recordings and spectrograms, identifying species using dichotomous keys, verifying iNaturalist observations, pinning insects, and identifying mammals from tracks, skulls, and camera traps.)
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If you have wood ants you could try erasing their trails with solvents (you may recall what happens from A Bug's Life), if you have time to observe a nest, adding visual signals (flags and whatever) to see if that changes how they navigate etc.
sep 1, 2025, 8:43 pm • 2 0 • view
That's fun!
sep 1, 2025, 8:44 pm • 0 0 • view
Erase trails with alcohol - you'll find them going up trees or whatever. Ants soon find their way back to the trail via random walk. You could time it and see what the relation is between the length of trail you have erased and time it takes to remake it.
sep 1, 2025, 8:45 pm • 1 0 • view
To clarify, the "skill sessions" activities have to be something we can do in a classroom (I have an active learning room). We have outdoor field labs each week, so this is in addition to going outside, not instead-of. :)
sep 1, 2025, 9:05 pm • 12 0 • view
I want to be a student in your class, it sounds wonderful!!
sep 1, 2025, 9:19 pm • 6 0 • view
I also want to be a student, it sounds super neat!
sep 3, 2025, 7:55 am • 1 0 • view
You could hook up an amplifier and use the pickup to explore a sample of fungi or other stuff you know is safe. I've discovered that different things make different sounds depending on how close the pickup is. You can definitely hear magnets for example.
sep 2, 2025, 4:43 am • 0 0 • view