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Chapter 15:  Evolution 

• Peppered moth simulation    Read the instructions and do the activity.

• Dot Hunter:  The Game of Natural Selection    Read the instructions and try the activity.
  Questions from the website --
   

  1. Did you notice a change in the numbers of the different colored dots of the starting versus final generations? Explain the change.
  2. The different colors represented what within this population of dots?
  3. Variation is the key to natural selection. What would happen if the starting population of dots was all the same color?
  4. If you were a bird predator, and the dots were tasty moths, could you have affected the evolution of the moth's color over a few generations? Explain.
  5. If you repeated this activity would you get exactly the same results? Why or why not?
  6. What if the background of your screen were dark? Explain.
  7. What does this tell you about the importance of changes in the environment for populations of organisms?
  8. What would happen if, as the predator, you could only see certain colors, dark colors for instance? How would this affect your results?
• Another peppered moth simulation

Viruses

• Animation of HIV entering a cell, being copied, and leaving the cell

• Animations of several viral replication cycles

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Chapter 8:  
Crossing the Membrane

• Watch a movie showing an Amoeba eating a Paramecium by endocytosis (phagocytosis), a type of bulk transport.

• See a good animation of endocytosis showing how the plasma membrane acts.

• See a good animation of exocytosis showing how the plasma membrane acts.

• Some molecules can diffuse by slipping between the phospholipids.

• Watch an animation of osmosis.

• A very good animation of osmosis, but slow to load.

Cell Cycle

• Great animation of the cell cycle.  (A large file)

• Onion root tip slides

• Mitosis movie - in an plant cell

• Mitosis movie - in animal cell (long download)

• Cytokinesis:  Egg to tadpole

Chapter 6:
Diffusion 

• Watch a simulation particles diffusing through water by Brownian motion.

• Diffusion in a liquid:  series of 3 simple drawings.

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Bonding

• See an animation of two hydrogen atoms sharing electrons to become one hydrogen molecule.

Carbon Compounds

• Many illustrations and diagrams of the four types of organic compounds.

Biodiversity  

• Read about bait stations.

• Find out how to set up and use a pitfall trap.

• With extra time, use a search engine to find more descriptions of ways to sample invertebrates from your yard.

• See another diagram of a pitfall trap.

• And another pitfall - with a screen.

• And another ...

• And another...

 Preparing slides from fresh plant leaves.

Click on the small pictures below to see the full-sized images.

				These students made a surprise discovery during their first investigation with microscopes.  After making wet mount slides of whole aster leaves and learning that whole leaves are too thick for microscope study, they tore the leaves and made new slides.  Some of the slides showed stomata and epidermal cells with remarkable clarity.  We produced the micrographs below using a digital Sony Mavica and shooting directly through the eyepiece without any special attachments.  We turned off the camera flash and used a computer to adjust the contrast and brightness of the images.