Monday, October 03 11:32 am
Marci studied the effects of plastic debris on water striders. Photo courtesy of Marci. Click to enlarge.
Growing up near coastal California, 17-year-old Marci watched plastic litter enter the ocean at an alarming rate. After reading about how this debris affected large vertebrates, she wondered how animals lower on the food chain fared.
Marci decided the water strider species Halobates sericeus would be the ideal subject for her experiment. “Since these fully pelagic water striders live solely at the sea-air interface, their life is played out completely on the two-dimensional surface of the ocean,” where most plastic debris collects, wrote Marci in her essay Effect of Neustonic Microplastic Debris on the Pelagic Insect Halobates sericeus. Her experiment earned her a 2011 Young Naturalist Award.
Marci focused her efforts on the North Central Pacific Gyre, a region of rotating ocean currents in the Pacific where plastic collects. She analyzed samples that had been obtained by running a net along the surface of the ocean during cruises. By comparing modern-day samples with those collected during the last 40 years, Marci could look for changes in the abundance of water striders and plastic. Read more »
Monday, September 26 11:37 am
Jill kept track of the honeybee groups in her experiment by painting them different colors. Photo courtesy of Jill. Click to enlarge.
Though honeybees are famous for producing honey, they also pollinate agricultural crops. Intrigued by these tiny pollinators, 16-year-old Jill decided to learn more about the role memory and landscape play in honeybee foraging and pollination.
“Honeybee memory is a primary source of honeybee prosperity,” Jill explains in her essay Memory Retention of Landscape Learning in Honeybees, Apis Mellifera, for which she won a 2011 Young Naturalist Award. After researching the importance of landscape memory in honeybees’ ability to forage and return to the hive, Jill conducted an experiment that examined the insects’ long-term memory.
Her study used the “relay landscape learning” method, a model that tests honeybees’ mental endurance by releasing bees at a point near a previous release and tracking their homing rate. Honeybees are more successful at returning to the hive when they are released in a familiar area because they can recognize landmarks that aid their navigation. Read more »
Monday, September 19 10:58 am
George measured the heart rates of grass shrimp to observe how the acidification of water affected the organisms. Photo courtesy of George.
Growing up in the Chesapeake Bay watershed, 14-year-old George was always attentive to its aquatic life. When he learned the waters were acidifying, George wondered how it would affect aquatic organisms.
He decided to measure the effects of changing water acidity, salinity, and temperature on grass shrimp, Palaemonetes pugio, using their heart rates as a measure of their metabolic oxygen consumption. For his investigation, which is described at length in his essay, The Effects of pH, Salinity, and Water Temperature on Palaemonetes pugio, George received a 2011 Young Naturalist Award.
Water acidification occurs when carbon dioxide dissolves in water and lowers the pH level. To monitor the effects of this process, George first collected grass shrimp from the York River in Virginia. Converting a room in his family’s home into a laboratory, George conducted a series of tests in which he altered the pH, salinity, and temperature of the water and measured the shrimps’ average heart rate. To account for the differences in size, George measured the length of each shrimp and calculated heartbeats per millimeter of length. Read more »
Friday, September 09 11:04 am
To prepare for his work at the zoo, Henry studied baboons at the Museum. Photo courtesy of Henry.
Henry always loved to observe. “Walking through parks,” he would later reflect, “I have watched squirrels, birds and other animals, always curious to know what their actions meant.”
So when given the chance to monitor the behavior of hamadryas baboons at Brooklyn’s Prospect Park Zoo, 15-year-old Henry grabbed his journal and found a comfortable seat by their glass enclosure. He wanted to know how captive baboons differed from their relatives in the wild and which activities baboons performed most frequently in the zoo. Profiled in a recent New York Times article, Henry’s project, which he describes in the essay Hamadryas Baboons, Papio hamadryas: Captive vs. Wild, earned him a 2011 Young Naturalist Award.
To compare the two groups of baboons, Henry created a checklist of the behaviors described in anthropologist Larissa Swedell’s study of Ethiopian baboons. Henry recorded how often the captive baboons sat, groomed, ate, and walked. Since grooming allows baboons to bond—and return the favor—Henry hypothesized that the zoo animals would groom more than anything else.
According to Henry’s results, the two groups shared 85 percent of their behaviors. Though the captive baboons didn’t perform any new actions, they lacked certain aggressive and sexual behaviors seen in their Ethiopian counterparts. Henry also found that sitting—not grooming—was the most common activity of zoo baboons. The warm weather or the size of their enclosure may have inhibited their movement, he reasoned. Read more »
Monday, August 29 2:17 pm
Kalia tested Eastern hemlock, along with green chili and garlic, for their effectiveness as natural pesticides. Photo courtesy of Kalia.
As she helped her family grow produce each year, Kalia learned how to protect her home garden from weeds, rabbits, and deer. But no amount of weed-whacking or fence-building could keep the insects away.
To try to solve this problem, 13-year-old Kalia embarked on a project to find out whether it was possible to avoid synthetic insecticides—and associated environmental and health risks—without compromising the harvest. For her investigation into green gardening, Kalia received a 2011 Young Naturalist Award.
Kalia sought a natural option for protecting her homegrown plants by turning to other plants. “Organic, plant-based pesticides that rely on plants’ natural defenses against insects may not only be effective and inexpensive for protecting crops,” wrote Kalia in her essay, Plant Extracts as Natural Insecticides, “But also safer and more environmentally friendly.”
She decided to test green chili and garlic—which both have track records as effective insecticides—as well as Eastern hemlock, which she hypothesized might repel insects much like the cedar, its relative. Using a food processor and some water, Kalia created three mixtures per plant and tested each by spraying them on greater wax moth larvae and recording the larvae’s survival rates over two weeks. To reduce potential errors—which Kalia details at length in her essay—she maintained a control group that she sprayed with water. Read more »
