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New Educational Activity: Mercury & Sharks

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Bioaccumulation of Mercury in Sharks: Part 1With great excitement, we would like to announce a brand-new educational activity now offered here on the RJD website! Utilizing a subset of data from RJD shark research trips, you can investigate the bioaccumulation of methyl mercury in South Florida shark populations.

Broken down into two worksheets, the first part will provide you with a strong background knowledge of what bioaccumulation is and how methyl mercury affects human health.

Bioaccumulation of Mercury in Sharks: Part 2The second part will walk you through a color-coded Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, organizing and analyzing mercury values found in shark muscle tissue. Then, you will be asked to draw conclusions based on your findings.

As a note, the curriculum is geared toward high school students and above, but anyone is welcome to give it a try! We hope that you will enjoy this new activity, and share your feedback with us. Also, feel free to explore our opportunities for participation in the field, collecting data just like what is used in this worksheet.

New Educational Activity: Mercury & Sharks

/2 Comments/in /by

Bioaccumulation of Mercury in Sharks: Part 1With great excitement, we would like to announce a brand-new educational activity now offered here on the RJD website! Utilizing a subset of data from RJD shark research trips, you can investigate the bioaccumulation of methyl mercury in South Florida shark populations.

Broken down into two worksheets, the first part will provide you with a strong background knowledge of what bioaccumulation is and how methyl mercury affects human health.

Bioaccumulation of Mercury in Sharks: Part 2The second part will walk you through a color-coded Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, organizing and analyzing mercury values found in shark muscle tissue. Then, you will be asked to draw conclusions based on your findings.

As a note, the curriculum is geared toward high school students and above, but anyone is welcome to give it a try! We hope that you will enjoy this new activity, and share your feedback with us. Also, feel free to explore our opportunities for participation in the field, collecting data just like what is used in this worksheet.

RJD Twitter teach-ins start Monday at 1 with overfishing

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We will be hosting a series of Twitter teach-ins on marine biology and conservation topics. Each teach-in will cover a topic in a series of Tweets, including links to photos and videos, as well as NGO reports, blog posts, and scientific papers which people can read to find more information. These will take place on our Twitter account, @RJ_Dunlap, and will include hashtag #RJDTeachIn.

We encourage anyone interested in participating in the teach-in to follow (and encourage your friends, colleagues, and Twitter followers to follow) @RJ_Dunlap. We also encourage people to RT important points for their own followers.

Each teach-in will take approximately 20-30 minutes. Following each teach-in, there will be an opportunity for anyone to ask us questions. We will answer any question that people ask us.

The topic of the first RJD teach-in, which will take place Monday at 1:00 EST, will be overfishing. Future topics will include invasive species, bycatch, seafood sustanability,  marine protected areas, shark biology and conservation, sea turtle biology and conservation, ecotourism, and more- stay tuned! Additionally, if you have a topic you’d like to hear more about, let us know in the comments section of this post and we may host a teach-in about it.

The mission of the RJ Dunlap Marine Conservation Program is to “advance STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) literacy and marine conservation by combining cutting edge research and outreach activities”, and we hope that these Twitter teach-ins will help us to advance that mission. We hope that you’ll follow along with the first teach-in Monday at 1 EST, and we hope that you’ll encourage your followers to do the same.