Anita's blog

I thought other zebrafish lovers might enjoy viewing this very interesting video of zebrafish and their brain activity while they are “swimming in their brains”. It’s like “the Matrix” for fish. By using zebrafish who have been manipulated so their motor neurons glow green, you can watch in real time which cells are “firing” as they “swim”. We can see this because at 5 days old, their head and brains are see-through. Very cool!A fish in the matrix – by Nature Video

Be the first to like.

Like

Unlike

I had a wonderful opportunity to observe the transit of Venus this past month (June 6th, 2012). Dr. Craig Lent is a professor in the Electrical Engineering Dept. at the University of Notre Dame. He is an amateur astrophysicist as well as an astrophotographer. He kindly set up his personal telescopes at the Trinity School Athletic Center, and hosted a star party- or actually a Transit of Venus party.

Here are some pictures of Dr. Lent and some of the observers.

If you would like to see some of his incredible astrophotos, check these out.

2 people like this post.

Like

Unlike

I ended the school year with some great students over at Clay HS. Even though it was the second to the last week of the school year, these students were on task, and really showed lots of interest in the gloFISH. We had very good success in breeding the fish, and were able to study quite a few crosses of the different colored fish. We had green gloFISH x albino, red gloFISH x albino, and orange gloFISH x albino offspring. The results of the phenotypes of the offspring were somewhat confusing. Some students saw 2 or 3 different colored floFISH embryos/larvae at the end of the experiment. These fish were the product of a cross between one gloFISH and one albino. How were they observing red, green and orange offspring from a red gloFISH x albino?? I am not sure. It was encouraging that the fluorescing pigment appeared to be observable in the 6 day old larvae. We will need more crosses to see how the genetics is actually playing out with these gloFISH zebrafish.

Here are pictures of students at work.

I have put together a short video of the students at work too-it’s my first job editing a video, so please forgive the mistakes. I had difficulty being able to go back and edit…. I am learning! Hopefully my next video will be better.

1 person likes this post.

Like

Unlike

This week the zebrafish went out to Navarre Intermediate School and visited Mr. Mark Anderson and his 6th grade class. Dr. Karen Delle Donne was the  Notre Dame Outreach Educator l for the week (May 20-25) . She usually shares the Nano, Enviro, or Astro week. This week, the students were lucky to have her, and her expertise-she has her doctorate in Pharmacology, and brought lots of great biology knowledge to the class. They had lots of wonderful things going on that week, including a field trip, and a day off, so they were only able to observe for three days. Mr. Anderson made it all work, and the week was a great success!

Be the first to like.

Like

Unlike

I had a wonderful week out at Holy Family with Mrs. Jeanne DuBois and her 5th grade students. Here are some of the week’s activities:

Students are carefully harvesting the zebrafish embryos with a fine mesh net.

Students then empty the collected embryos into a petri dish. The student is making sure to look over the mating tank so that she is sure she hasn’t left any of their babies behind!

If students did not have embryos in their mating tanks, they would go to the “adoption center” and adopt some from their (generous) fellow students.

Here students are cleaning out unfertilized eggs using a pipette. It is very important to clean out any contaminants that might harm the healthy zebrafish embryos.

Once the petri dish is cleaned, students then move to microscopes to observe their embryos.

Here a student is recording what his embryo looks like at that particular stage of development. He will have 4 days to see how this embryo grows and changes over the week.

If there are some interesting specimens, students are able to show their images by using the projection microscope and pointing out their findings to the class as a whole.

Here are some pictures of the hard working students and Mrs. DuBois.

Be the first to like.

Like

Unlike

I love when students are able to use the equipment provided by Notre Dame for even more than just the zebrafish. That happened this past week when I was able to work with Ms. Carol Govek and her 4th graders at Wilson. Ms. Govek had 3 different containers of “aquatic environments” in her classroom. One had lots of snails with water, one had water plants with water, and one had just “muck” with pond water. She used some of our petri dishes and set them up with the 3 different samples, and let the students observe these with the dissecting microscopes. How cool!! I spent some time observing these different petri dishes and had a blast! The snails, when observed with just the unaided eye, looked very plain. Place them under the microscope, and I couldn’t get enough-they were beautiful, and so interesting to observe!

Here are the students and their zebrafish.

Be the first to like.

Like

Unlike

This is a picture of students rescuing their zebrafish larvae which spilt on the floor, and were swimming around in a puddle of water. They were able to pipette all of the fish up, and place them back in their petridish-good save!

I am working with third graders over at Good Shepherd Montessori this week. It is small in numbers, but big in motivation! I have no other adults helping, and was a little concerned on Tuesday when, after the students harvested their embryos, they moved to observe them with the microscopes. Usually, this is THE most labor intensive time of the week for me-most students are struggleing to find a good image of the embryos. I do preface this time with a little “pep-talk” to the students, letting them know that this is the first time they are using these microscopes. I warn them to be patient with themselves, and just experiment/feel their way around the scopes, and they will need a little time to get comfortable with them. This usually NEVER works that way, however, and the students (even high school students) quickly begin to call out in frustration that they can’t figure it out, or they just give up.

Well…… I didn’t even have time to give my little “pep-talk”, but I was in for a GLORIOUS suprise!!! These children, who are used to working independently in the tradition of Maria Montessori, said not ONE word of complaint/frustration, but all were engaged at figuring it out by themselves. It was wonderful! I had two long tables of microscopes, with a fairly large and high book “island” in-between the 2 tables, and I was anticipating frantically moving from one table to the other, with a very overwhelmed bunch of students impatiently waiting for me to show them how to use the scopes. What I heard was “Wow, we are doing real science work!” from one of the students. It was a blast! I wish I had had my video camera running, because it was truly wonderful.

Here are some pictures and a short video from the last day.

Be the first to like.

Like

Unlike

I had a great week working with Mr. John Gensic and his biology students out at NPHS in New Carlisle, IN. I am always very impressed by his use of time in the classroom. Some of the classes were Advanced Placement, and began class with 5 minutes of some great review questions. The second the bell rings, he is jumping into some kind of learning activity such as a whole class interpretation of a projected image of a graph of scientific data. He engages all the students by calling on many of them (not waiting for them to raise their hands). When one student doesn’t know the answer, Mr. Gensic redirects to another student by asking them to help, thus “saving face” for the first student, and creating a safe environment for students to fail or succeed.

Once everything has been cleaned up at the end of class, there are some remaining minutes that aren’t just frittered away, but he asks some engaging recap questions that pertain to what the students were just working on. The tone of the classroom was one of high expectations, and I felt the students knew that Mr. Gensic was a great teacher, and was respected as such.

My job has many wonderful facets, one of which is that I am able to observe all sorts of teachers from kindergarten through high school, and have seen many wonderful teaching skills. I think it would be such a great opportunity for all teachers to have something somewhat comparable, but for obvious reasons, scaled down. There is so much to be learned by observing fellow colleagues in action. Observing one teacher-perhaps a mentor, is helpful, but observing lots of teacher/student interactions multiplies the amount of useful information on what makes for a successful teacher.

Here are some pictures from the week.

1 person likes this post.

Like

Unlike

Since 1998, the University of Notre Dame has been inviting girls in middle school (6th-8th grade) to come and spend a Saturday to mingle, and have some fun with local women with careers in the STEM fields (a program called Expanding Your Horizons). I was one of the lucky women who were able to interact with these girls this past Saturday (April 29, 2012). I had 3 different groups of girls during the day, and all were fun, and filled with curiosity!

I actually began each session showing a commercial from Notre Dame which highlighted the zebrafish research being done here in Dr. David Hyde’s Lab. It told of the important research here, and how these little fish were wonderful in research, and it all took 2 minutes to watch!

We then began working with the fish, setting up mating tanks with male and female zebrafish. We were in a beautiful chemistry lab in Jordan Hall, which just added to the “research” atmosphere! Once the girls chose just the right male and female, they placed the mating tanks into a dark bin to “trick” the fish into thinking it was night. The night only lasted about 30 minutes, however, so none of the fish fell for it , thus they did NOT produce any baby zebrafish for us!! While the adult fish were “hangin’ out, we began observing (using microscopes) some embryos that I had collected throughout the week. These fish were at various stages-a few hours old, one day, two days, and three days old. The girls were able to guess what order to place their petridishes in so that they were lined up from youngest to oldest (without have that information written on the petridishes), and were very excited to see the embryos!

While we were together, I tried to ask each girl what her area of interest was, and what they thought they might want to do for their career. We had a couple marine biologists, some interested in veterinary science, some that just liked science in general, and one girl that responded “THIS, (while pointing to her microscope with the embryos on the stage), THIS is what I would want to do!” She just had a blast observing the embryos, and I felt so blessed to be there to share this experience with her and all the girls.

Here are some pictures of the girls.

Be the first to like.

Like

Unlike

We have begun the week of BioEYES at Adams High School. Tomorrow we will see whether we have some successful mate choices or not.

OK-I’m back to report that egg production was pretty miserable!! We got ONE mating tank out of about 45 with embryos. It was a cross between a GLOfish and a striped wildtype. Again, it was very difficult to detect whether the offspring had that “fluorescent” pigment or not. I think that in order to correctly identify the phenotype, the experiment may need to run over the course of 2 to 4 weeks. For the fish to remain alive over the next few weeks, care is labor intensive-larvae are kept in beakers of system water which needs to be changed daily. Ambient temperature is at 83 degrees. Food is sprinkled in 3 to 5 times daily. Even with all this care, many of the organisms die. I may be able to have the technicians at Notre Dame raise the larvae, and then email the results to the students. What would be fun is to come back in a month with the fish for the students to observe in person. We will have to evaluate this, and see if it would be feasible. I have one more high school this semester (Clay High School) but it is the very last week of school so it wouldn’t work in that instance…

Check out some of Ms. Zablocki’s students in action here

Be the first to like.

Like

Unlike