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Student Activity

Investigating Coral Bleaching

Through the lessons in this module, designed for grades 6-12, students are guided through the use of NOAA data (sea surface temperature and SST anomalies, coral bleaching hotspots, and degree heating weeks) to understand how scientists monitor coral bleaching events in order to determine what is happening to the health of coral reefs in the world’s oceans. The module offers lessons at five different levels, beginning with basic graph interpretation (Levels 1 & 2) and building towards activities that challenge students to ask questions and develop their own data investigations (Levels 4 & 5).

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Winged Ambassadors: Ocean Literacy Lessons

The classroom activity package Winged Ambassadors – Ocean Literacy through the Eyes of Albatross is available free online courtesy of NOAA, Oikonos, and other partners. Albatrosses, charismatic and threatened seabirds, are ambassadors for a clean ocean because they traverse vast oceanic regions searching for floating food. Along their journeys, they ingest plastic trash and feed it to their chicks. These five lessons comprise new and modified activities, using inquiry-based science instruction, aligned to new standards for grades 6 – 8 with extensions for grades 9 – 12.

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Help Nemo Find his Home!

In their ocean habitat, clownfish use an exceptional sense of smell as a
mechanism to help determine which direction to swim, called “olfactory homing”. When given a choice between two water currents, one with the scent of an anemone and the other with the scent of the open ocean, clownfish will choose the anemone scent nearly every time! They can also tell the difference between the scent of a predator
and the scent of a friendly non-predator…like Dory…choosing the nonpredator nearly every time! However, recent research in Australia has shown that the olfactory homing ability of clownfish is severely disrupted by ocean acidification (through interference with neuron
function).

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