I should have posted a few weeks back on this opportunity but it came upon me a bit quick this year.  Usually the trip is held in early to mid-October.  Did you have anything to do with this change, Stan?  jk

Well, since I missed seeing you all at the KABT meeting yesterday, I figured why not post on next weeks field trip and maybe I’d have the chance to catch up there instead.  So, here goes…

Background

The Kansas Herpetolgical Society has been holding field trip since its inception in the mid-1970′s, so I am told.  The mission of the society is, as Joe Collins states on their website:

…to encourage scholarship, research, and dissemination of scientific information through the facilities of the Society; to encourage conservation of wildlife in general and of the herpetofauna of Kansas in particular; and to achieve closer cooperation and understanding between herpetologists, so that they may work together in common cause.

Beside publishing a quarterly newsletter and then journal (see pdf archives), the society has organized a fall meeting, and a spring and fall field trip annually.  This year’s meeting will take place on November 4-6 at the Great Plains Nature Center in Wichita, KS.  A summer field trip was held for the first time in more than 15 years this year as well.  Although the society doesn’t display photos of their trips via their website, you can become a member of a related Kansas Herpetology group on Facebook that does.  Travis Taggart also maintain the wonderful KS Herp Atlas (one cool thing you can do at the site is get a current listing of herpetological taxa by county).

My Experience

I have been participating in the society since the mid-1990′s having been made aware of the society via Dr. David Edds at Emporia State University (thanks David!).  I have taken students to participate in the spring and fall field trips for over a decade now.  You can navigate to my website with pdf slideshows of our past forays.  In fact,  view at least one of these slideshows would be the best way for you to get a feel for what the trips are like.

For those of you that are now considering participation in the KS EcoMeet after yesterday’s introduction, I can say that my students have learned a lot on these trips over the years without realizing they were learning anything.  In fact, our success in winning the state competition the past two years is likely attributable their scoring so well on the herpetology taxa test.  This year’s taxa test is on birds so it won’t help as much but…

So, here is what I do every year to keep this going:

• I edit a Field Trip Information Form that I prepared years ago for the particular county we will be traveling to.  Click on the link for the form for this year.   I also have particular district forms that need to be handed out and signed by parents as well, and have to make the district aware of the field trip since it usually is quite a distance from school and is an overnight trip as well.
• I advertise the trip in my classes by showing pictures from a previous field trip, and hold an informational meeting generally 2-3 weeks prior to the event.  If you hold it too soon, student priorities change too much and some will drop out.  By holding it early enough though, you can have a separate meeting the week before the event to arrange whose is bring tents, etc…
• On the day of the trip, I have students drop off their supplies before school so that I can pack the van during the day and be prepared once the school day is done to get on the road.  In more recent years, I have received permission to leave earlier in the day on those more distant trip so that we might arrive with some daylight remaining.
• Then, the rest is all about being yourself.  If you demonstrate your passion about the outdoors, your students will behave in kind.  I have never had a bad trip (knock on wood)!

Realize that when I first began involving students in this field trip, I actually met a small number of student at the site for just the Saturday’s events.  I didn’t drive them, I didn’t have a forms, I just told them about this public event and met them there.  So, don’t feel like you have to go for three days, camp out, stay up road cruising until 2:00 am in the morning, etc… 

I’d be happy just to see you on Saturday which would be quite doable for those of you in the middle of the state for this years trip in Jewell County (north of Salina on the Nebraska border).

So, that is that.  I hope you found something that might help you lead a KHS Field Trip in the future.  If you have any questions I will respond to your comments or feel free to e-mail me at ekessler@bluevalleyk12.org.

Hope to see you in the field!

http://schoolofants.org/

The School of Ants project is a citizen-scientist driven study of the ants that live in urban areas, particularly around homes and schools. Collection kits are available to anyone interested in participating. Teachers, students, parents, kids, junior-scientists, senior citizens and enthusiasts of all stripes are involved in collecting ants in schoolyards and backyards using a standardized protocol so that we can make detailed maps of the wildlife that lives just outside our doorsteps. The maps that we create with these data are telling us quite a lot about native and introduced ants in cities, not just here in North Carolina, but across the United States and, as this project grows, about the ants of the world!

Follow the link above to find out how you can participate and help inspire your students to become the next E.O. Wilson!

This morning, I saw a twitter post on an interesting new free phone app.  Here is a brief video on the app posted at YouTube:

and here is what the developers say on their website:

Leafsnap is the first in a series of electronic field guides being developed by researchers from Columbia University, the University of Maryland, and the Smithsonian Institution.  These researchers are working on visual recognition software to help identify species from photographs. Leafsnap is the first in a series of electronic field guides being developed to demonstrate this new technology.  This free mobile app helps identify tree species from photographs of their leaves and contains beautiful high-resolution images of their flowers, fruit, petiole, seeds, and bark. Leafsnap currently includes the trees of New York City and Washington, D.C., and will soon grow to cover the trees of the entire continental United States.

Leafsnap turns users into citizen scientists, automatically sharing images, species identifications, and geo-coded stamps of species locations with a community of scientists who will use the stream of data to map and monitor the ebb and flow of flora nationwide.

The genesis of Leafsnap was the realization that many techniques used for face recognition developed by Professor Peter Belhumeur and Professor David Jacobs, of the Computer Science departments of Columbia University and the University of Maryland, respectively, could be applied to automatic species identification.Professors Jacobs and Belhumeur approached Dr. John Kress, Chief Botanist at the Smithsonian, to start a collaborative effort for designing and building such a system for plant species. Columbia and the University of Maryland designed and implemented the visual recognition system used for automatic identification. In addition, Columbia University designed and wrote the iPhone, iPad, and Android apps, the leafsnap.com website, and wrote the code that powers the recognition servers. The Smithsonian was instrumental in collecting the datasets of leaf species and supervising the curation efforts throughout the course of the project. As part of this effort, the Smithsonian contracted the not-for-profit nature photography group Finding Species, which collected and photographed the high-quality photos available in the apps and the website.

Once downloaded and opened, one can challenge oneself to one of a number of identification “Games”, “Browse” the current field guide of 184 plants, set particular “Options”, and take a picture using the phone’s built in camera that should automatically upload to the leafsnap database via “Snap It!”.  Once you have uploaded images, I assume you can view your own “Collection”.

Once you are browsing, you can view the species contained in the app using their common or scientific name, in a manner familiar to iPhone users and also used by National Geographic’s bird identification app.  By clicking on the image icon in the upper left-hand corner of this screen, the app toggles between displays of a representative leaf, flower, or fruit associated with each tree specimen, a nice feature that could help to confirm one’s hypothesis of identification.

Once you select a particular species, you can view a collection of detailed images of the trees leaves, flowers, fruits, seeds, and bark, or use the image icon in the upper right-hand corner to toggle to a dispaly basic information on the species being viewed.

The games section includes timed quizzes that test one’s ability to identify tree specimens by leaf, flower, or fruit in the “Leaf Challenge”.  The second image below is a screen shot of this game.  The name of the tree leaf to identify with a finger tap is noted, while the number correct and time left are noted in the upperleft and right-hand corners of the screen, respectively. 

In “Green Sweep” you are given four leaves to identify that are floating around the screen.  You identify each by moving them into their appropriately labeled square, with a touch and a drag.  If correct, it challenges you with another four leaves to identify, and continues in this manner until your time is up.  Each of the game categorizes your exepertise based on your score at the end of the game.

In using ”Snap It!” the app uses the phone’s built in camera to take a picture which is then uploaded for identification by the recognition software described previously. 

Sadly, I have not been able to get this function of the app to work completely.   I went out a tried to take a picture of a redbud leave only to realize that your are supposed to take the picture of the leaf on a white background (I hadn’t read the top of the screen).  The app realized this though and informed me which was demonstrates its sophistication. 

After correcting this mistake, I had issues with the app crashing when I took a picture within the app.  So, I exited the app and took the picture within phone’s camera app, and selected to chose that image from within leafsnap.  This time, I experienced crashes while the app attempted to upload the image for identification.  I even changed the image resolution to small in the options setting to no avail.

With the number of people working on this app, I imagine that such problems will be solved in a short time.  I only wish they had a way to report bugs via the app or on their website.  If and when I get this aspect of the app working, I will edit the post and make a comment to report changes.

I look forward to using this app with my students!

Addendum:

Since the time of the orignal post, I e-mailed leafsnap, noticed that an update was posted on twitter, downloaded the update, and tried to upload an image of a Redbud from my back yard again.  This time it worked!

After uploading the image, it loads results to your phone.  The results are ordered, I assume by some probability of it being a match with the outline of the uploaded leaf image (you can see the top three results in the middle image above).  If you click on the “map” button at the top of the page it shows where the leaf was collected (dang, now you know where I live).

To verify a particular result, one finger swipes across the chosen selection to bring up the red label button (first image above), and selects the “label” button by touching it (second image above).  Once this is done, the labelled image now appears in your “Collection.”

Pretty cool! 

Now, I challenge you to be the second to add an image from the Kansas landscape!

Earlier this week, Jim, a previous neighbor of mine, called to inform me of an interesting “natural event” that was taking place in a shrub next to his driveway. 

Here is a video of that event up close.  He had been out performing yard work in the past days and was sure that these bees had shown up over a short period of time.

I an effort to find out what exactly was happening and what he could do, Jim called his mother, who called her neighbor (who happened to be a master gardener), who then contacted Jarrett Mullenbruch (pictured below) who happens to be a sculpter with an interest in ecology, and who is currently working on an installation that integrates live bees. 

Once Jarrett arrived, he proceeded to talk to us about his Deep Ecology Project and then collected the bees for his installation.   To view a pdf slideshow of the images that I took, click on the image above.  You can view a collection of videos documenting the collection of the bees below.

Thanks for letting me in on the experience Jarrett and Jim!

Now for the Behavioral Challenge…

1. How many bees would you estimate are in this swarm?
2. Can you explain why the bees are engaged in this behavior in the first place? 
3. Why is a bee hanging around the container full of bees in the third video?

I imagine that students could generate numerous questions that would stimulate quality discussions of this interesting animal behavior…

Providing some interesting links to resources or websites that could help students uncover the details of this natural event would be welcome as well.

This pond dries up every year---no fish

Back in my early teaching years we would venture to a nearby pond that only held water in the early spring to collect frog eggs.  I haven’t looked for eggs for awhile and I was a bit late, this year.  This Sunday I did some wet wading and found some eggs in a pond that is dry most of the year.

Chorus frog eggs

Leech from wet wading

Maybe it is too late for this year but for next year you could get a permit from KDWP and collect a group of eggs to raise in class.

About to hatch

Here’s a great web site from Greg and Lynnette Sievert from ESU with recordings and tons of photos of developing Kansas frogs and toads–a great resource.

From http://dragonflywoman.wordpress.com

Click on this image or this link to Dragonflywoman’s blog to learn how to preserve insects in hand sanitizer….what a cool way to prepare insect specimens for the classroom.

http://dragonflywoman.wordpress.com/2011/02/21/hand-sanitizer-preservation/

BTW,  you’ll find a lot of great insect resources on her web site.  I think you’ll be impressed.

Week of January 31, 2011

Click on the logo above to go the the NPR Science site, or use the links below to navigate one of the stories that I thought may interest you.

• Tiny Water Flea Clocks In Record Number Of Genes (3:39)
• Genes Play Role In Selecting Friends, Study Finds (4:41)
• NASA Detects Dozens Of Potential ‘Habitable Zone’ Planets (3:11)
• Doctor Challenges Cause Of MS And Treatment (5:29)
• ‘Lolita’ Author Nabokov Was Right About Butterflies (4:32)
• Deep Below Antarctic Ice, Lake May Soon See Light (4:53)
• ‘Alarming’ Amazon Droughts May Have Global Fallout - text
• Why Keeping Little Girls Squeaky Clean Could Make Them Sick - text
• Tools Never Die. Waddaya Mean, Never? and Am I Extinct? - text
• Dogs Earn More Cred For Sniffing Out Cancer - text

I tried to embed these videos for snow day viewing pleasure but I couldn’t.  All of these videos are about the snowflake research conducted by Dr. Ken Libbrecht, a Caltech physicist.

• Growing a Snowflake in a Bottle – Science Friday
• Snowflake Safari - Science Friday
• Snowflake Watching – YouTube