Yesterday, mommy took me and my two younger siblings to a science festival. We got there somewhere around 11:30 (it started at 10:00 and ended at 2.). It was almost like a convention in that there were lots of different booths. At one science booth, we stopped to look at different things under the microscope. The plant that fascinated me most was this flower.
When I looked at the middle dark part of the flower, this is what it looked like:
Then, at the next booth, people had hissing cockroaches from Madagascar!!
Hissing is used to startle predators and it's also used to attract a mate. The cockroaches force air out of their abdominal air holes, called spiracles. They produce two kinds of hisses: upon reaching a certain developmental stage, all hissing cockroaches can produce the disturbance hiss, but only males ever emit the fighting hiss. Their hiss is 90 decibels, which is equivalent to the sound made by a lawnmower or hair dryer!
Hissing Cockroaches live 2 to 5 years and eat leaf litter and fallen fruit.
Here are some more pictures of them.
There was also a booth that had baby seahorses swimming around in a bucket!! I have always wanted to have a seahorse for my pet. They're so cute!! Here are a couple of pictures. Sorry they're blurry.
- Seahorses have excellent eyesight and are able to work independently on either side of their head. That means they can look backwards and forwards at the same time! :) That's pretty cool. Their eyesight helps them alot as they hunt for food.
- Seahorses have long thin snouts enabling them to probe into nooks and crannies for food. When they find food they suck it up through their snouts like a vacuum cleaner. Their snouts can expand if their prey is larger than the snout. They are not able to chew and have to disintegrate the food as they eat it.
- Seahorses eat small crustaceans such as Mysis Shrimp. An adult eats 30-50 times a day. Seahorse fry, which is baby seahorses, eat a staggering 3,000 pieces of food per day.
- Females have a territory of about 1.4 sq meters and males have a territory of about 0.5 sq meters.
- Seahorses pair for life. (When I read that, I thought of the anglerfish. They stick to each other for life, too. ) They meet first thing in the morning to reinforce their pair bonding with an elaborate courtship display. The female meets the male in his territory and as they approach each other, they change color. The male circles around the female and the pair often spiral around an object. This display can last up to an hour, then the female goes back to her territory.
- The male is the only creature where the male has a true reversed
pregnancy. The female transfers her eggs to the male, which he self fertilizes in his pouch. The number of eggs can vary from 50-150 for
smaller species and up to 1,500 eggs for larger species.
The babies receive everything they need in the pouch from oxygen to food.
Gestation time varies from 14 days to 4 weeks.
- Baby seahorses are known as fry and when they are born, they're totally on their own. They spend the first two to three weeks of their lives drifting along in the plankton layer of the ocean. Due to predators, only like, 1 in 1,000 survive.
- Seahorses have a prehensile tail. This allows them to grip onto eel grass and other weeds and prevents them from being washed away by strong currents and waves.
- Seahorses can change color very quickly and match any surroundings in which it finds itself. They have even been known to turn bright red to match floating debris.
- Unlike most other fish, seahorses have an exo-skeleton. Their bodies are made up of hard, external, bony plates that are fused together with a fleshy covering. They don't have scales.
- Seahorses are poor swimmers. They rely on their dorsal fin beating at 30-70 times per second to propel it along. Pectoral fins either side of the head help with stability and steering.
- Seahorses are able to grow fleshy appendages called cirri on their bodies. This gives them a weed like appearance and helps with camouflage.
- Seahorses live in shallow weedy areas especially eel grass beds. In winter they move into deeper waters to escape the rough weather.
I hope you enjoyed the little science lessons about the cockroaches and the seahorses. My favorite part about the seahorse is that the dad carries the eggs around! These animals truly show the ingenuity of the Lord!Saying of the week:
Bible verse of the week:
Proverbs 1:7 "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge: but fools despise wisdom and instruction."
Have a fabulous, good and godly week everyone!!!
In the name of our omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent,transcendent, immutable, Lord and Saviour,
Ashley :)
Many,
if not most, plants measure the relative length of darkness to light in
a 24-hour day to tell them to prepare for winter. In a similar way,
they measure the relative length of light to darkness to tell them to
prepare for spring. Other living plants seem to integrate time and
temperature to prepare for the seasonal change. Apple buds, for example,
need 1,000 to 1,400 hours of near-freezing temperatures before they
even think about spring. 
along
and sees the orange light – the bait – to him, it looks like a good
lunch for a small fish. He moves in, but it jumps out of reach and the
next thing he knows he becomes the angler fish's lunch!
placed for perfect sight while swimming on his back.
suggested
an increase in ultraviolet radiation was causing the problem. But none
of the suspected pollutants have yet been found in association with
deformations in the wild. Now some answers are beginning to emerge.
For
generations, evolutionary scientists tried to explain our origin by
comparing fossilized bones. But more recently, they have turned to
comparing the genetic material of current human groups. You might
remember when scientists announced that they had discovered that all
living people could be genetically traced to a woman in Africa many long
evolutionary years ago. They called her "Eve." Today they admit that
this picture is a little simplistic. Further studies have led to two
contradictory theories. In the first, all humans today evolved from a
single African population. The second position is that modern humans are
the result of the interbreeding of populations from Africa, Asia and
Europe. Some also admit that the flaw in both positions is that the same
genetic data can be interpreted to support either theory. 
But
a few botanists realize that even when it comes to wild plants in North
America, a surprising percentage of these plants still have not yet
been discovered, named or described scientifically. One modern botanist
who holds this belief has named 118 new plants, discovered 61
distinctive varieties and 57 recorded plants that have been named as new
species. While some of the newly discovered plants that have been found
relatively recently are in remote locations, many are seen by people
every day. A member of the lily family that was first described in 1972
grew only 10 miles from downtown San Francisco. What is now known as
Morefield's leather flower was discovered in 1982 on a vacant lot in
suburban Huntsville, Alabama. Botanists working in this field estimate
that 5 percent of North American plants still remain either undescribed
or undiscovered.
Actually,
we have two immune systems. The first is called the innate system. This
rapid response system relies on common characteristics found in most
microbes to bind and conquer them. The second immune system is called
the combinatorial immune system. It is this second immune system that
generates tens of millions of different and very specific antibodies.
Its response is slower than the innate system because it responds to an
infection by making and sending a variety of antibodies at invaders.
Depending on which antibodies recognize the invader, the combinatorial
system then begins to manufacture more specific antibodies until the
invader is conquered.
Researchers
at several universities around the United States have confirmed that
Mozart's complex music has positive effects for both adults and
children. In one study, rats were subjected to Mozart for 12 hours a
day, beginning four weeks before birth. A second group heard only
silence, a third heard only a constant hissing sound, while a fourth
group heard only minimalist composer Philip Glass. When the rats were
old enough to run a maze, they were tested. The Mozart rats not only ran
the maze considerably faster than any of the others, but they made
fewer mistakes. Other research has shown that adults do better on
intelligence tests after hearing Mozart. While this effect is temporary
in adults, children exposed to Mozart show a permanent improvement.
