Boston students find hands-on learning at Marine Science Center

 

 

“Welcome to the rocky intertidal zone. I guarantee that you will fall down,” said Tim Dwyer, a National Science Foundation GK-12 Fellow and graduate student in biology.

His audience: students from Seneca King’s AP Biology class at Health Careers Academy, the Boston charter high school hosted on Northeastern University’s campus. The setting: Northeastern’s Marine Science Center in Nahant, Mass., during an overcast morning on the 20-acre seaside campus.

The students spent a day at the center, which was ideal for a laboratory exercise illustrating and summarizing basic principles of community and population ecology as well as ecological survey techniques.

The rocky intertidal zone — the area of shoreline between high and low tides — is one of the harshest environments on the planet. The plants and animals that call it home spend at least part of the time in and out of the water, and need to be able to deal with a wide range of physical conditions such as intense heat and cold, severe wave action from winter storms and regular risk of dehydration.

Biological factors such as predation and competition for growing space make life here doubly difficult. These conditions vary drastically over a short distance causing attached plants and animals to be arranged into distinct “zones” with respect to their height above low tide.

Ecologically, a lot is happening in a very small area, making this an excellent environment for teaching concepts such as competition, predation and herbivory, succession and even population structure.

The students arrived shortly before low tide, grabbing rubber boots, 50-meter-long surveyor’s tapes, clipboards and quarter-square-meter PVC frames, known as “quadrats,” before setting out for the seaweed-covered rocks. The immediate task was to quantify the abundance of seaweed and animal species found at low, medium and high tidal heights. This was accomplished by laying down the surveyor’s tape perpendicular to the water’s edge, placing quadrats along the tape and then counting everything found inside the squares.

Eventually the collected data would be utilized in conjunction with their understanding of ecology to explain the patterns of distribution and abundance that their data show.

Navigating the slippery, uneven rocks, especially with the added burden of surveying gear, can be tricky. And sorting through piles of spaghetti-like seaweed to find, identify and count snails and other small animals is laborious and time-consuming. Additionally, the class needed to focus, working under the pressure of the impending return of the tide.

By dividing up jobs such as data recording, searching and counting animals and plants, groups of students set to work, periodically asking questions about what they were seeing and for clarifying details about the sampling procedure.

Within an hour and a half, the surveys were complete and the data recorded … just in time for the tide to return.

Dwyer is a biology graduate student working in the intertidal ecology lab of assistant professor Geoffrey Trussell. As a fellow in the NSF-sponsored GK-12 program, he works with King’s students at Health Careers Academy several days a week, helping to plan the curriculum and coordinate field trips such as these.

The GK-12 program runs under the direction of Claire Duggan, associate director of Northeastern’s Center for STEM Education. For more information, see www.gk12.neu.edu.