Grass, the Horror Story

What's the most widespread plant you see as soon as you walk into Rand Parl? It's not the trees or the flowers or any plants lining the brook, it's the grass. Grass is everywhere. It's covering the park, it's common all around the world, it's probably covering most of your lawn right now. Yet, despite its constant presence, or maybe because of it, grass is not talked about much other than needing to cut or water it. That doesn't change the fact that grass is a very influential plant in its environment.

Grass is the perfect plant to be present on lawns, golf courses, estates, etc. This is because it looks attractive, feels great on bare feet, produces fewer allergies than other plants (when it is maintained it doesn't grow enough to produce flowers), and is very resistant to trampling, temperature changes, and other environmental factors. Sadly, what we think of as common grass is likely not native to whatever region you live in. Two of the most common grasses are Kentucky Bluegrass and perennial rye grass which originate from Kentucky and New Zealand ,respectively. Additionally, most sod and bags of grass seed contain 5 to 6 species of grass to allow the grass best suited to that environment to thrive. In many cases none of those species of grass are even close to native, making those lawns covered with invasive species.

However, the fact that most commercial grasses are invasive is not the biggest problem with grass. It is a widely accepted fact that biodiversity is an essential part of a healthy ecosystem. Decreases in biodiversity lead to unbalanced populations of species, unbalanced environmental factors like the presence of chemicals, and extinction events. Grass can be the cause of a significant decrease in biodiversity.

VS

First of all, grass, with human help, practically smothers the ground it is living on, making it difficult for native plants and trees to grow. Those plants then become more sparse, making it harder for plants to have a high genetic diversity. Also, there are fewer habitats for bees in grassy areas so plants aren't fertilized as much and produce fewer seeds with a higher percentage of seeds being made from two gametes from the same plant.

Next, because the populations of many species rely on specific food sources that are being slowly replaced with grass, those species' populations will shrink in size and density, causing breeding to become rarer and the population to drop even further. For example, many birds, like the robin, eat mainly seeds. Grass does not produce seeds when it is cut regularly, like it is on most lawns, and the plants that do produce seeds are much less common. The grass most people use on their lawns decrease the biodiversity of native plants and animals, sometimes even to the point of becoming endangered.

Thankfully, there are a few ideas in circulation of ways to stop this downward spiral. One is to plant clover instead of grass. Clover covers the ground just as well as grass does, and is durable. It also doesn't grow very tall and therefore needs to be mowed less, and it produces flowers low to the ground, meaning seeds and nectar are produced which will feed bees and birds. Another idea is to leave part of your yard completely untamed, allowing anything and everything to grow back there. This will give native plants a place to take hold and thrive so they don't disappear from suburban areas.

You can't even tell it's clover

Even if you don't want to plant clover or leave part of your lawn untamed, you should still host something native, or at least let the grass grow high enough to produce seeds. Recently the grass in Rand Park was left unmowed, and the grass grew tall enough to produce seeds within a few weeks. Anything that will provide food or shelter for native wildlife is a step in the right direction. So what are you waiting for? Go out there and stop planting grass!

Knowing is Caring: An Exploration of Rand Park's Inhabitants

In early May students attending Ms. Weeg’s, Mr. Ambrose’s, Ms. Wright’s and Ms. Chmura’s biology classes engaged in an activity based partly in ecology and partly in philosophy. They were presented with a lesson detailing the complex interactions between wolf, moose, and fir trees on Michigan’s Isle Royale as provided by Michigan Technological Institute's John Vucetich.  Despite the extraordinary life needs of the organisms involved and the dramatic scenario of predation between the three, the lesson concluded with two surprising central questions: “Do we now care?” and “Why do we now care?”

            Initial answers came easily enough. Students felt that they should care because it concerned balance (or lack thereof) within an ecosystem. They felt that it was their duty to care about such things because ultimately, any imbalance would impact them. Before long, the complex nature of the question was highlighted; teachers pointed out that Isle Royale is completely isolated from any main land, that its ecosystem is atypical from most others, and that what occurred there had almost nothing to do with what occurred in Montclair.  It was then posed that the answer might be of a much simpler nature: We suggested that they now care because they now know. Observing a species with great scrutiny, knowing how it struggles or thrives throughout its life cycle, instills one with the capacity for empathy. Empathy might have the power to encourage emotional investment in our students and we were wholly ready to take advantage of that.

            This was the birth of the multi-phased project “To Know is to Care”, throughout which students would take a detailed look at Rand Park, note the subtle differences between its voluminous inhabitants, and investigate the life of one in particular.

            The project began with the creation of a dichotomous key concerning aquatic and terrestrial autotrophs and heterotrophs within our sample ecosystem. During this phase students discovered that the trees they had previously seen as one general species consisted of multiple species possessing only slight differences in visible traits. They learned that the wood sorrel they first knew as clover was drastically different from the luck bearing plant, and that as much was evident from its sour citrus like flavor and heart shaped leaves.  Students overcame their fear of wild water and delved into the brook to overturn rocks in search of carnivorous leeches, gentle snails, and wonderfully slimy planaria. 

Mr. Ambrose describes the rich ecology present on a single rock found in the brook (photo credit: Susan Eckert)

            The excitement for choosing the focal organism for phase three of the project was palpable. Students raced to find their teacher at the completion of identifying, photographing, and labeling all key species, hoping that they would be able to select the organism they were most interested in before any of their classmates could.

            Students next engaged in the last phase of the project. They conducted research regarding specific criteria on the organism they chose: What was its life like? What organisms facilitated its existence in the park? Which would it loathe to encounter? These questions and more served as an avenue towards “knowing” not only the organism they selected, but also any organism with which it interacted. 

         After spending nearly two hours of critical observation on avian, mammalian, and other species within the park and spending twice as much investigating one of those species in particular, it was clear that students had grown to see Rand park, not just use it. They had come to know the intricacies of its community, and we dare hope that knowing may have led them to care. 

Intelligence and the Brain

The brain is a remarkable part of the body. It is an extensively complex network of nerve cells which each connect with dozens of other nearby cells to form signal pathways and structures and circuits, etc. A brain can simulate logic and emotion, and is the only organ in the body that, when removed, causes instantaneous death. Almost all animals cannot survive without a brain. And despite the vitality of it, we do not understand nearly as much about the brain as we would like to. One of the biggest fields of study is related to intelligence in various organisms, which I will talk about in this post.

The first question crossing the mind of a scientist tackling this topic is likely "How do you define intelligence?". For humans this can be very generally assessed by the IQ test. There are some longer and broader tests that can be somewhat accurate (a particularly good one can be found here), but they often fail to take into account creativity and unorthodox answers. But for other animals, which are far less intelligent, the IQ test is too advanced and we need to make something simpler. At the primate center in Duke University the lemurs are being tested by a computer that displays two images with different numbers of dots of varying size and shape. They are trained to select the image with fewer dots for a reward (found here).

Another study devised a puzzle box which required pressing a button with one limb and opening the lid with another to get food, and intelligence was measured by the percent of organisms that were able to open the box and get the food (found here).

In these studies it is explained that the ability to open the box or distinguish quantities can be linked to intelligence, but that isn't all there is to it. Some of the lemurs in the first experiment were able to complete the test faster than some college undergraduates at the prestigious Duke University, but that doesn't mean they are actually more intelligent. Also, in the box experiment, bears were far more successful at opening the box than meerkats, but meerkats often have much more complex social groups than bears do. Plus, we are still missing one crucial aspect of intelligence, curiosity.

None of the animals in these experiments were curious about the box on their own, they all had to be tempted by food to try to solve it. Like other traits on this topic, it is hard to measure curiosity scientifically. One way is to introduce something foreign into the species environment and see whether they notice it at all and if so how long it captures their attention, but beyond that it is difficult. Humans, most apes, and some other mammals like dolphins are curious, but the vast majority of animals are not. Being curious is often not an evolutionary advantage, because it involves getting within a dangerous proximity to unknown things or animals and can lead to higher mortality rate.

Despite all of these tests for problem solving and curiosity and quantity differentiation, there is no way to test total intelligence simply by tests. Every species on earth requires its own set of skills to survive, and anything else is unnecessary and not selected for. Asking a bull frog to open a puzzle box to get food out is like asking a chess computer to predict the weather. The frog would breeze through the complex task of raising tadpoles, but cannot perform a much simpler task because it is not important for survival.

So, now that we know assessing the true intelligence of an animal is all but impossible, lets assume that we can test intelligence. What kind of patterns might emerge between intelligence and the physical brain? The first thing to look at would likely be brain size. After all, having a bigger brain means more neurons, more connections, and more complex neural networks. But we run into an issue doing this. (paper found here)

As this graph demonstrates, the mass of an organism's brain is inversely related to its neural density. Basically, as brain size gets larger, fewer neurons can fit in a certain volume so we end up with a brain that is larger but also less complex for a given volume. Also, larger animals simply have larger bodies with more nerve endings on the skin and more, larger muscles to move.

For example, lions and mice have nerves on every hair that can each relay a different signal to the brain to detect movement. The lion has far more surface area on its body so it has many more signals that need to be processed individually in the brain. Plus, the lion has to have more nerves taking the signal to larger muscles requiring stronger signals. Then there is the fact that any signal traveling from one part of the brain to another will take much longer in larger animals because the brain is bigger and nerve signaling pathways are likely indirect. These effects combine to cause brain size to be primarily dependent on the organism's size. 

There are two ways to get around this. One is to exclude from measurement the parts of the brain used for the senses, motor controls, memory, and other size-dependent areas. This is impractical though because the brain's neural networks span many different areas of the brain and it would be impossible to isolate and extract only neurons used for logical thinking. The second option is to measure the brain size to body size ratio and compare that between species. Sadly we meet another issue. A mouse brain takes up about 10% of its body's mass, while a human brain takes up 2% and a blue whale brain takes up .01% (still 5 times larger than a human brain though). We can't base intelligence purely off of that ratio. But there seems to be a pattern in that ratio between body and brain mass. Scientists have graphed the ratio for a large collection of animals, resulting in the graph below.

And sure enough, all of the animals included follow a nice straight distribution. Now we are able to measure the amount of brain mass dedicated to logical processing by saying the line of best fit is the average amount of brain mass dedicated to logical thinking, and say that animals further above the line are considered more intelligent. At a glance it seems to work fairly well. Primates are considered very curious and clever compared to other animals, and they are mostly above the line. Plus, humans are the furthest above the line of any species measured in this study, which is significant on a logarithmic graph. Also notice that the line of best fit does not have a slope of 1, it has a slope less than one, which accounts for the difference in ratio between mice, humans, and whales discussed earlier. 

However, even though we may be able to make a general assessment based off of this graph, There has been little experimentation relating this ratio to actual intelligence. Many scientists steer clear from this topic of discussion because of the extreme difficulty of obtaining large enough samples of quantitative data from multitudes of species. So to finish off this post I want to talk specifically about human intelligence.

Scientists have been looking for ways to predict intelligence accurately for a long time. There are, of course, IQ tests, but there are also brain activity monitors (often used to compare savants to average people), a test involving only a raisin and a cup (here), and plenty more just a google search away. A very intuitive answer is just to say that larger brains mean more intelligence. We aren't dealing with any evolutionary differences or other factors like before, so it may work. However, that doesn't seem to correlate at all with intelligence.

One study that analyzed a large group's brain size and intelligence through a series of tests found that the intelligence of an individual was basically random chance when using brain size. Also, men have very slightly larger brains on average but women get slightly higher grades in high school and college on average. Even Einstein, considered one of the most intelligent and creative humans to have existed, had a brain weighing about 1230 grams, much less than the average mass of 1400 grams. Brain size is definitely not a good measurement.

While we are on the topic of Einstein's brain, is there anything different between his brain and most people's? According to various studies, his brain is not larger as a whole, but it's main communication pathways between brain areas were much stronger than those found in most brains. Also, he had a larger number of glial cells, which nourish neurons providing ATP and ions and allowing the neuron to be activated easily and recover quickly. This reinforces the ideas about intelligence emphasized so far, that intelligence is not based off of the size of part or all of the brain, or about how developed one part of it is. Instead intelligence can be thought of as the ability to use more of your brain and use it more effectively.

One big reason brains are so complex and hard to understand is that every single one is different. Neurons in the brain increase in strength and density, along with their bonds at synapses, in areas they are used consistently. So when Einstein was thinking about physics as a child he was building and strengthening complex structures inside his brain that specialize in physics. As a result, he had one of the most mathematically brilliant minds in history. Anyone can have the brain of a genius in any field. You just have to put the work in and build your own brain to do what you want it to do. Genetics, size, neuron density, and every other genetically determined factor, do very little when compared to the ability for a brain to build it's own structures to serve it's functions. You can take control of your own intelligence. All you have to do is think.

Rand Park: A Future in Farm-to-Table Cuisine?

As of now, the local community surrounding Rand Park views its grounds as part of the Montclair High School campus. The area does not serve the neighborhood as a public park; it is seen as more of a garbage dump. How can we, the students of MHS, change the landscape of Rand Park from a trash can to a safe environment for outdoor recreation?

AP Biology students observing the garden's growth

Our AP Biology teacher spearheaded the effort to create an edible garden in Rand Park. Varieties of lettuce, peas, herbs, and other vegetables were planted in raised beds in May with the intention to bring back a feeling of community that would thrive in the center of Montclair. In order to succeed in our gardening capabilities, we will need to utilize the help of the MHS student body. By addressing the first problem in the park, the amount of garbage left during our lunch periods, we can make the area healthier and safer for those who come to enjoy it. Other biology classes can participate in maintaining and expanding the garden in the coming years to promote that healthy, organic food can be grown anywhere with the right resources and support.

A young snap pea grown in Rand Park

 After our first harvest of the mature pea plants, one was offered to a passerby. He responded in disgust, questioning our sanity for eating something grown so close to students and their unpredictable behaviors. Our teacher joked that the freshmen peed on the peas and the individual seriously agreed, addressing how untrustworthy teenagers can be. How could he be repulsed by a piece of produce, grown without a trace of pesticides a few feet away, but willingly buy fruits and vegetables at the grocery store that have been manhandled across the country? The amount of chemicals that are used to grow and maintain produce for sale is staggering. A recent report from the Environmental Working Group stated that fruits such as grapes and strawberries are sprayed with over 35 types of pesticides; imported varieties can be in contact with even more. A simple washing with water does not rid produce of the added pesticides because thin skin allows chemicals to seep in and heavy waxing also traps pesticides underneath.  


The Montclair Fund for Educational Excellence, with the help of the PTA Council and Partners for Health Foundation, launched a school garden initiative in Montclair to promote the importance of school gardens. The program is called Montclair DIGS (District Initative for Gardening in our Schools) and has assisted our efforts in creating and popularizing gardening at Montclair High. The group is not new but the school only just recently tapped into the funds from the MFEE to start a gardening initiative in Rand Park. With support from Montclair DIGS, students can extend the garden's potential through donations to food banks and a miniature farmer's market in the MHS cafeteria.

Knowing what is used to nurture and protect your food is valuable information, so why not know by growing your own? With a joined effort from MHS Biology classes, we can cultivate knowledgeable students as well as healthy food to improve the the school as well as the surrounding community in the near future.

New Supreme Praying Mantis Has a Knack for Fashion

Do you spot any similarties between Justice Ruth 
Bader Ginsburg and this praying mantis?

As an incoming high school senior, I’ve heard my fair share of college information sessions. Each talk overlaps in material and one point is repeated at length: research. Usually offered in larger universities, research is promoted as a way for undergraduate and graduate students to make an impact in their respective fields. Some apply for research positions just to get their feet wet, but others take the opportunity to make a difference. Sydney Brannoch, a graduate student at Case Western Reserve University, along with the Cleveland Museum of Natural History recently identified a new praying mantis by studying female mantis’ genitalia. This new method contrasts the typical research of male mantis’ genitalia to categorize species. Not only does the work done by Brannoch have the ability to revolutionize the way biologists categorize species in the future, but the naming of this mantis is revolutionary as well. 

Madagascar: home to talking lemurs and political praying mantises!

The new species of praying mantis from Madagascar, Llomantis ginsburgae, was named after the Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, known for her support of marriage equality and women’s rights. The species was first discovered in 1967 but was only closely studied and identified in the last year. Along with her position on women’s rights in her career, Ginsburg was the inspiration for the new mantis’ name because of its prominent neck plates that resemble the jabots that the Justice wears. 


"As a feminist biologist, I often questioned why female specimens weren't used to diagnose most species," Brannoch said. "This research establishes the validity of using female specimens in the classification of praying mantises. It is my hope that our work not only sets a precedent in taxonomy but also underscores the need for scientists to investigate and equally consider both sexes in other scientific investigations."

With this research, studying females in new species can be legitimized as a practice in the field of biology. Findings from female specimen could potentially bring about more information on the world's organization of animals than we could ever imagine.

 With all this excitement, someone should tell Justice Ginsberg to plan a vacation to Madagascar so she can meet her praying mantis doppelganger! And make sure she packs her jabots!

For more information, click here.

Rock-a-Bye Baby

      In developing the idea for this post, I had a hard time deciding what to write about. It was late, I
was tired, and my bed was calling my name. The drowsy smoke of sleep permeated my thoughts until it was all I could focus on. And that's when I finally got my idea­- sleep! One of those biological processes necessary for humans to do work on a highly functioning level. Sleep, that thing that is constantly evaded by teenagers (be it for studying or otherwise), despite the fact that we need it the most while our bodies are still developing. Even though everyone does it, do we ever stop to ask­ why do we? Or how does it happen? For this post, I've decided to delve a little into that place of dreams, heavy sighs, and occasional drooling.
                               

Sleep is defined as, “a naturally recurring state of mind characterized by altered consciousness,

relatively inhibited sensory activity, inhibition of nearly all voluntary muscles, and reduced

interactions with surroundings”. Sleep is important because the body is in an anabolic state-
building up the proteins/necessary building blocks for the major body systems. While sleep is

still a topic under much study in the scientific community, we understand that sleep is necessary

for homeostasis. In fact, scientists have developed research to show that sleep is a time for the brain to cleanse itself. This newly dubbed glymphatic system transports waste-heavy cerebrospinal fluid to recycle it within other cells.

                                    
Sleep is divided into 2 major parts-­ REM and non REM sleep. REM stands for rapid eye
movement. In REM sleep, the body is more alert, this is the part where we usually dream. Non- REM sleep is characterized by a significant drop in energy use. During this time, the brain restores its supply of ATP. The body cycles between REM and non-REM, as it falls into deeper periods of sleeping. The body cycles and comes close to lucidness every 90 minutes or so, this is an evolutionary mechanism developed so as it keep humans alert in the case of danger or predators while in a vulnerable position.

                          
Humans’ bodies are on a circadian rhythm, meaning that an internal clock regulates us so we
sleep at night. However, with industrialization and artificial light, humans now operate on more
shifted schedules. Also watch out guys- teens should be getting at least 8 hours per night!
                              

Other intriguing factors of sleep include the ever-mysterious sleep disorders. These issues, arising from problems genetic or otherwise, have raised questions, theories and stories all on their own. Common disorders include sleepwalking, narcolepsy, insomnia, and a personal favorite, sleep paralysis (this occurs when the sleeper is lucid/half-asleep and yet paralyzed in their body, the possible dreams they may have can cause visual or auditory hallucinations to produce a surreal and somewhat terrifying effect). Scientists have linked sleep disorders with previous mental or physical trauma, alcoholism, mood disorders, anxiety, or drug usage.
                                 
As you can clearly see, sleep is one of those things we've barely begun to uncover. Things like how it can cause Alzheimer's, affect weight problems, cognitive function, and mood are all being discovered. That place where we spend our darkest hours can hold so much information on our brains and how they work! If you want to learn more, check this stuff out~~

 http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2013/10/sleep-ultimate-brainwasher

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNhDkKAvxFk

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2010/05/sleep/max-text  

If You Plant It, They Will Come

My first day of teaching at MHS was on January 10th, 2013. I was in room 502 in the annex, which has a wall of windows facing Rand Park. I took one look at the park from the classroom and thought, "Yes!" despite the park's obvious flaws. In 2013, Rand Park was often filled with garbage (it still is), Japanese knotweed took over the stream bank (it still does), there were very few native shrubs and perennials (that is changing) and there wasn't a single vegetable to be found (that has changed drastically).

But, despite all of these shortcomings, I felt like I had hit the biology teacher's jackpot.

The view of Rand Park from my window

A student can learn the biology curriculum from a book alone and do reasonably well with the assessments they are given. I envision this scenario: students flipping through old, tattered books scanning the text for "the answer" like they're looking for a word in a word search game. And then, with a sense of satisfaction, pressing their pencil down on the correct line on a worksheet to prove that they know "the answer." And most of the time, the answer is correct on the worksheet and on the test. A diligent student could ace every exam by approaching the class this way. But, I think it's fair to say that they may not have learned a lick of biology--I think of it as hollow learning. And that's where Rand Park comes in.

In grad school, we were asked to write a paper that explains our teaching philosophy. As I wrote that paper, I reflected on my own experiences as a biology student at Dickinson College. Of course I spent many hours reading the textbook (and it was time well-spent) but I don't recall any specific memories about poring over the details of some biochemical pathway. But I do recall the time my professor held his hand up to the moonlight during a marine study course in the Bahamas. He was marveling at the beauty of the human hand and the sequence of cellular events in an embryo that resulted in such an elegant structure. I also remember stomping through the woods in the late winter trying to identify trees by their bark alone, walking through a cemetery collecting data for a demography study, and visiting a brewery to learn how yeast make beer. I remember these things because they were real--I could see, smell, taste and feel this world. It was biology, of course, but I was experiencing it in my own space as I moved through the natural world, not the space of a book and a cubicle. And these experiences felt magical.

And now back to Rand Park and my dear students. My dream, my goal as I gazed at Rand Park that first year was to turn it into an outdoor classroom that will not replace the textbook; rather, Rand Park will complement the book and curriculum and bring to life many of the things that the students learn about. It's now 3.5 years later and my dream is slowly becoming a reality with lots of help (more about the help later). There are birds aplenty in Rand Park, which became abundantly clear to students as they watched a red-tailed hawk devouring a squirrel. And we have created a bird habitat including feeders and plants that attract birds. There are native and invasive species battling it out. There are leeches and water bears making their home in Toney's Brook. There are raised garden beds with peas and lettuces overflowing. There is a once-neglected bed along the atrium that come summer will be filled with fragrant basil, parsley, rosemary and cilantro. We planted cucumbers, watermelons, and morning glories. And like the post title says, if you plant it, they will come. The picture below is of a black swallowtail butterfly caterpillar (Papilio polyxenes)--the species uses parsley as a host plant. It has eaten much of the parsley but we don't mind. It's exactly what I was hoping for, actually.

A black swallowtail butterfly caterpillar munching on our parsley in front of the annex.

And so we are slowly building this outdoor classroom. The space is already certified as a wildlife habitat by the National Wildlife Federation. The animals have noticed. And so have the students...well, the ones that are looking. That's where the teachers come in. We can act as tour guides--point things out, give a little information, ask some probing questions and get out of the way.

And none of this would be possible without the help of many, many people. It has truly taken a village. I'd like to acknowledge and thank the following people and organizations: DIGS, Sabina Ernst for her plants and gardening know-how, Sarah Vogel for her landscape designer services, Robin Schlager, MFEE and Steve Wood for getting the bird habitat off of the ground and supporting the park, Deb DeSalvo for her bird expertise, Robert Haas and his carpentry students for building the post for the feeders and repairing the beds. Peter Giuffra for faithfully picking up the garbage and planting the begonias year after year, Kris Moser for loaning me the faucet key and always helping me out when he can, the ecology club for planting and the AP Bio students who plant and write and frolic and just fill my heart with joy. And oh, this little guy, who is my son and helps me pick up the garbage in Rand Park. He's pretty into it.

Dave Eckert, MHS class of 2024

Saving the World One Ugly Fruit at a Time

            Have you every rejected a bruised banana or an oddly shaped strawberry? Or thrown out leftovers that have sat in your fridge for too long? In the world, more than half of fruits and vegetables grown gets lost or is wasted. This is especially troubling because nearly 800 million people in the world do not have enough food to lead a healthy active life. Fortunately there are some efforts underway to reduce food waste and make it available to those in need.

            As a developed nation, we are especially wasteful. This is not only an ethical issue, but it is also an environmental issue. Wasted food means wasted water, fertilizer, fossil fuels, and land. Produce is often transported across the country. We like to get California’s avocados and Florida’s oranges up here, but it isn’t so easy. The fruits and veggies get passed on from one shipping truck to another until they reach their destination. From one handoff to the next, more and more avocados and oranges are thrown out. We are already struggling to reduce our carbon footprint; reducing waste can help to do so. Genetically modified organisms, or “GMOs” are also helping to reduce waste. Biologists incorporate genes into their produce that will extend their lifetimes and make them less susceptible to damage. This allows them to survive longer over their journey from the farm to the table.

            Our grocery stores have certain cosmetic standards that need to be met in order for produce to be sold. They worry that the oddly shaped fruit will not be bought, and may actually scare away customers. Often times, entire shelves of perfectly edible shell peas are thrown out to make room for incoming ones, or bundles of zucchini are rejected because they curve too much. The heirloom tomato, a non-hybrid form of a tomato is a fruit that we have transformed artificially solely because of its appearance. Their ridged surfaces, being unappealing to people, were artificially selected against to make smooth, glossy surfaced tomatoes that we see today in supermarkets. Heirloom tomatoes are actually said to have a richer, juicier taste, but because of our obsession with aesthetics, we have diminished these scrumptious tomatoes of those qualities.

           Fortunately, “misshapen” fruits and vegetables are actually becoming a trend. There are organizations that are selling these fruits for less money, so that low-income families can afford them and they don’t go to waste. DC Central Kitchen in Washington DC is one of them. Each week they recover 15,000 pounds of food that they turn into healthy meals.

Fun fact: Many producers actually spend extra to make their fruits and vegetables glossy and appealing by adding an external wax, which does not improve the taste or freshness of the food.

            Though food waste has become a global problem, there are things that we can do locally to address this issue and provide a solution.  First, we can become more aware of how much we actually consume during a given week so that we don’t buy more produce than necessary.  Not only will we be creating less waste in our homes, we will be sending a signal to the produce companies of a more realistic idea of how much needs to be stocked in grocery stores. Second, buying produce locally is a benefit for the environment. It reduces fossil fuels that would be emitted while moving the produce from one far away region to another. Buying produce locally reduces waste because there is less opportunity for the foods to spoil or get damaged during the journey. Here in Montclair we have the farmer’s market that supplies locally farmed foods to our neighborhood from short distances around New Jersey.  If you haven’t checked it out already, I truly recommend J

Source: http://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2016/03/global-food-waste-statistics/

Black Bears and Water Bears in Montclair

On Thursday as Montclairions were excitedly monitoring the actions of a black bear strolling through the streets of downtown Montclair, I was gleefully peering into a microscope at a much smaller bear. Of course it was not a black bear if you haven't already figured that out. It was something much more exciting to this biophile--a water bear! Water bears have many names: Tardigrade (its phylum), space bear, pudgy wudgy and my personal favorite, moss piglet.

A water bear through a microscope, 100x. Picture by Nicholas Figuracion. 

My AP Biology class had collected some water and muck from Toney's Brook and I had decided to see what kind of microorganisms were present before I set the students free with the microscopes. The very first view of the very first wet mount I prepared contained the tiny creature above. I had placed a cover slip over the sample and I saw the eight stubby legs pushing against the glass as it plodded along. (Tardigrade, after all, means slow stepper.) Now, this picture, as neat as it is, does not really do the water bear justice. To truly see this creature in all of its glory, you need to see it magnified thousands of time more.

Isn't it cute? I just love these little critters! Water bears live almost everywhere on Earth and have even been to outer space. They fascinate scientists and nature-lovers alike because they are practically indestructible and can survive some of the harshest conditions known. Recently, scientists have sequenced the water bear's genome and the results were just as strange as the creature's appearance. Almost one-sixth of the tardigrade's DNA comes from other organisms, mostly bacteria, through a process called horizontal gene transfer. Scientists believe that these foreign genes contribute to the animal's ability to survive such harsh conditions.

So, are you wondering whether my students were excited as I was at seeing all of the organisms living in Toney's Brook? I can say that they were with a resounding yes. We spent the whole period straining our eyes as we peered into this small-scale world. The brook on our own campus is teeming with life that is invisible to the naked eye--a world unbeknownst to students as they cross the bridge to visit the perennial food trucks.

AP Bio students observing the microorganisms of Toney's Brook

Teachers have good days and bad days. Any day that students are engrossed and fascinated by the natural world is a good day. And so I must say that this past Thursday was a very, very good day.