Bees & Colony Collapse Disorder

In class on Friday, we talked about apples for a bit, then used that as a departure point to discuss the role of bees as pollinators for many common foods. Over the last 3 years, bees have been disappearing suddenly and unexpectedly, a problem known as colony collapse disorder. Here’s a nice video on CCD from PBS that introduces the problem.

Prompts for Omnivore unit 2

Here are some prompts to help guide your reading in unit 2 of The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Be prepared to discuss all of these in class this Thursday, and to handle all of these topics on the quiz on Friday.

1. Compare and contrast organic and sustainable. Provide examples from the book of each.
2. What is a holon? Describe the holon in place at Polyface Farms.
3. Why does Salatin consider himself a grass farmer first and foremost? What are the implications of this for his farming operation?

Food documentary workflow

To help you get moving forward on your food documentary projects, I recommend the following.

1. Brainstorm possible ideas. Try to come up with at least 4 or 5 ideas before moving on, your first impulse may not be the most appealing in the long run.
2. Flesh out one or two of your ideas in more detail, perhaps having a conversation with me about their feasibility at some point.
3. After settling on an idea, hit the library to learn all you can about it. Resist the urge to move ahead before doing this, as you will undoubtedly learn something (or a lot) about your subject by visiting the library. Your video will need to include a minimum of 2 book sources, 5 sources overall, so you might as well use these up front to get informed before moving on.
4. Write a proposal for your project. Act as though I were the boss of a big-time production studio and you are trying to convince me that your idea is worth producing. This should be at least a page in length and should include a description of your topic, why you want to cover this topic, and what your approach, story, or ‘hook’ will be to make a compelling video.
5. Outline your project. It doesn’t have to include every detail you plan to cover in the video, but it should give you a good master plan as you prepare further.
6. Storyboard your video. Unlike writing, video communication is a visual medium, and you will need to think about the visual images you want to use to communicate your ideas to the audience. I suggest using actual drawings at this stage to begin to picture different scenes and the information you might communicate in each scene.
7. Write a script, if necessary. Some projects will include a narrator reading information as you show video or still photographs. Others will include spoken words by individuals on camera. In both cases these words need to be written beforehand so that you know what to say. If you are planning to interview someone on-location, you would want to write out the interview questions beforehand, perhaps even providing them to the interview subject before your actual interview.

A good example video

As you begin to think about your video documentary projects, I wanted to show you a great example of a professionally-produced short video that is representative of one approach you might take. I believe you and a partner would be able to achieve a similar quality of video as shown here. Have a look below.

To get started, create a new document in BishopApps and begin brainstorming ideas. Include a brief (1-2 sentences) description of your idea after you’ve brainstormed. Be sure to share your document with me so I can provide some feedback.

Plants as food

There are three major characteristics of plants that are significant as we begin thinking about plants as food.

• Sessile (non-motile) — being fixed in place leaves plants vulnerable to all kinds of attack, which they defend against by elaborate collections of chemical agents.
• Autotrophic (self-feeding) — they don’t chase their food down like animals, so they have no nerves or muscles, but they do need a sturdy system of structural support.
• Photosynthetic — plants eat light and carbon dioxide, turning these into sugars. They are adapted for exposing large surface areas to collect light (leaves) and moving large quantities of water for cooling.

Nitrogen fixation data

I have compiled the nitrogen fixation data for both sections. Use the appendix of the lab manual to work through the analysis of the data as instructed. Let me know in class if you have any questions.

Lab report rubric

Here is a pdf of the lab report rubric I use for BOMI 110 papers. Use it to make sure you’re including the necessary elements in your lab report.

Summer Research Opportunities, 2009

Some off-campus plant-related research experiences for Summer 2009.

Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research at Cornell University

Donald Danforth Plant Science Center

Center for Plant Cell Biology at UC Riverside

Chloroplast 2010 project at Michigan State University.

Molecular Biology and Genetics program at Indiana University

or choose from another at the NSF listing of REUs.

Omnivore’s Dilemma, Unit 1 questions

Read through the first unit (Industrial: Corn) of Michael Pollan’s book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, for next Thursday, 29 May. Write a minimum one page response on one of the following topics or, alternatively, create your own topic related to the reading and respond to it.

1. What is the evidence that we are “corn walking?”
2. Discuss three reasons for the excess of corn grown in the US today.
3. Describe the concept of hybrid corn and discuss its advantages and disadvantages.
4. What is the natural diet of a cow? Discuss 3 effects of feeding corn to a cow.

Assembling scientific posters

For some of you, this will be the first scientific poster you have written. As you can imagine (and observe as you walk around the Science Center), this is a specialized form of scientific communication that requires a different approach than a formal lab report or Powerpoint presentation. For background, I suggest reading “Advice on designing posters”, written by a faculty member in Biology at Swarthmore. Another option, if you need still more background, “Creating effective poster presentations” is another good background site. Both of these assume you will be printing a large-format poster, but you aren’t expected to for the session next Tuesday. Nonetheless, both sites give you a good idea of the kinds of things you should and shouldn’t do to present your work in this format. There are some, um, “interesting” photos of posters and their presenters if you dare to look.