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Traveling Otters

 Welcome to a new post. This is for Unit 2 of the STEAM class Population. This class focused on adaptation and evolution. We discussed how animals have adapted over time to be better suited for their environment. We talked about mutations and watched a video of bacteria traveling through antibiotic by developing mutations to pass through them. In this class the central tendencies in math became important and was used more frequently up to the Action Project. Like in the last unit there was another dissection. This time we dissected an owl pellet or owl regurgitation. In my dissection I found three skulls of what looked like rodents and some other bones as well. This dissection did not smell as bad as the worm. For the AP I chose to look at the North American river otter. With these amazing mammals I tried to predict what they would be like in at least 500 years and made a data set from ten river otters. One important aspect from this AP is our group of animals being transported to a different environment they are used to. So the ten river otters I thought looked up for the challenge went on a virtual trip to the El Yunque rainforest in Puerto Rico. The slideshow consists of everything required in the AP and enjoy. 



I hope you liked the slideshow I created talking about the river otters. We did go over some of this in class such as who is most or least likely to survive and I changed a couple after looking at it a second time. Doing this in class was very fun because we were all together and made it into a small story that played out in front of us. I think all otters are pretty amazing creatures. Their abilities like closing their noses and ears when underwater are really crazy and the movement is interesting given the long body. I can't remember what animal I was going to observe more before the otter but it might have been ferrets. This AP was cool to work on even if we had a shorter amount of time than usual. This is the end of the Fall term so we were trying to get everything that needed to be done fast to get started on the AP. We still made it work though and this class was great and even better with our very fun and cool teacher. Thank you for looking at this post I hope to see you in the next term.

Sources: 

“Otter Evolution.” Otter Facts and Information, www.otter-world.com/otter-evolution/.

 “North American River Otter.” National Wildlife Federation, www.nwf.org/Educational- Resources/Wildlife-Guide/Mammals/north-american-river-otter. 
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