Matt+Sparks+Journal

Free Journal #1

In my area there is a lot of variety in the plants and animals that live there. There are these small little fish swimming around in the water and i noticed that they live mostly in the stiller water then where the water is rushing. I think that is because these fish are pretty small and they would not be strong enough to withstand the pushing of the current for very long. There are also a lot of mosquitos but i noticed that they are mostly up towards the top and the start of the stream where the water flows pretty fast. I think that is because the fish don't live up there so more of their larvae can live. I also think there are so many mosquitos there because there is no wind down there so they can fly around really easily. There are also a lot of plants down there living and they really don't get too much sunlight so it is pretty amazing to me that they would be able to live. I guess they have adapted so they can live without being in the full sun and just getting sun throughout a small part of the day when the suns rays can make it through the big trees branches. Some significant abiotic factors is that there is a rusted out old car there that i think got crashed in there and nobody took it out. This car serves as a place for plants and animals to grow on and maybe they can be safer from harm because they are higher up and they are out of the water. Also some people brought some wood down there probably to sit on and now it is infested with ants and underneath it is a huge ant colony which I almost stepped on. I think this is a great place for us to study mainly because of the diversity that it has with all of the things living there. It doesn't have a very complex environment but it does have a pretty interesting one ( to me at least). It also isn't to hard to get down close to the water so I could get a very close up look at what is really happening down in the water instead of just viewing it from above and maybe missing something that could be a very important part of why this ecosystem works so well.

Assigned Journal #1

For my assigned journal entry i have decided that i am going to describe the predator/ prey relationship that I saw direct or indirect evidence of. I went there on Saturday, October 11, 2008 and it was at around 12:00 p.m. The weather was a little overcast and it was probably about 80 degrees. The predator/prey relationship that i saw some evidence was was the relationship between the fish in the stream and they were eating the mosquito larvae that were living in the stream. I did not see direct evidence of this relationship even though I looked for about ten minutes just looking for a fish that was eating mosquito larvae. I did see a lot of indirect evidence like the fact that there were a lot more mosquitos swarming around the upper parts of the stream where the fish couldn't really go because the current was a little too strong for them too swim up there and because there were rocks in the way. This means that because the fish were eating all of the mosquito larvae down there were a lot of fish the mosquitos got smart and started putting their larvae in a place were the fish would have a way harder time getting to them. Also another indirect way I observed this predator/prey relationship was from the fact that there where a lot of fish swimming in the lower parts of the river and when I looked down there the only food i saw available for them to eat was the mosquito larvae. After thinking about this relationship I realized that the fish might eventually go extinct if the mosquitos start only laying their eggs where the fish won't really be able to get close to them. If that were to happen and the fish did go extinct i would think we would get a huge increase in the mosquito population and then after their population goes up the bird population will probably go way up too because they would now have unlimited resources and plenty of room for them to live in also. So this is actually an extremely important predator/prey relationship because these fish are keeping the mosquito population in check and that is also keeping the bird population in check. If anything were to happen to the fish population an if it were ever to drop drastically that could cause the whole ecosystem to crash.

Free Journal # 2

In this journal assignment I will explain many things including: what role I chose, some questions that I have about that role, and I will be trying to maybe answer some of those questions. The role I chose to study at Makiki Stream is the role of plants and what they do to either help or hurt the ecosystem there. There are many types of plants at Makiki Stream and the variety of them is actually a little overwhelming. There is moss on almost every rock and weeds are growing in abundance. I really find the variety of plants at Makiki Stream to be quite interesting and even kind of beautiful. There are also huge trees that tower over the stream and block out some of the suns rays. It would be interesting to find out if those trees blocking out the sunlight made any difference on what types of plants and animals could live there. Maybe the tall trees are making the forest not as hot and it allows animals that live better in warm environments instead of hot environments to prosper. Also the moss and algae that lives in the water is pretty important as a part of the environment because I am pretty sure that it is one of the main- if not the only food supply for the fish that live in the upper parts of the stream. Now going back to the weeds. The weeds are overgrowing and taking up most of the space where indigenous plants might be able to live. They are also growing at weird angles to maximize the amount of sunlight they receive and to take away sunlight from the rest of the plants in the area. The plant life is equal on both sides of the stream so I guess that means that the sun gets in on equal sides of the stream and that there aren’t like more predators on one side or anything like that. However there are some interesting things about the plants at Makiki Stream that I would like to find out about. One of the things I would like to find out is what types of plants are there at Makiki Stream and did they adapt over time to be like how they are now. So this is my journal on Makiki Streams plants and I hope you learned a lot from it.

Assigned Journal Entry 2

One of the best ways to describe the natural selection and variation at Makiki Stream is that it is a war zone to see who can evolve the fastest and gain the upper hand at that point and time. Some evidence of this is that you will see plants and weeds that are growing crooked and that some plants can not grow crooked so the weeds are winning in that small battle in the war zone of Makiki Stream. Also, there are many types of fish in the water there but only one of them has a lot of that type of fish and that certain type of fish has adapted so that it is the same color as the bottom of the stream and you can just barely make it out on the bottom against the sand. However there are some fish of a different species that stick out like a sore thumb against the boring grayish brown color with there black scales. How they are still alive amazes me. Maybe they have adapted to have some kind of poison or other feature that makes predators not like them. Out of the water though are where some of the really interesting adaptations are taking place. There are mosquito’s every where and I must have gotten bit several times without even noticing so those mosquito’s that bit me must have adapted so I couldn’t feel hem while the ones that I did feel I smashed as soon as I saw them. I guess the traits they had won’t get reproduced to any more offspring. But the ones that did take my blood will be able to pass their ability for me not too fell them on to there kids and eventually we might not be able to feel any mosquito’s and we will just have to suffer through the itchiness. Another example of things driving to be the most successful in the ecosystem is the trees that were just towering above us and were actually kind of scary when the wind blew them. Those trees have adapted over an extremely long period of time so that they would be able to grow as tall as they could so they can get more sunlight and water then the rest of the trees. So this is my assigned journal entry about natural selection at the ecosystem of Makiki Stream.

Free Journal #3 So in our groups last visit to Makiki Stream we had a very interesting time looking at all of the different species that lived around Makiki Stream and how they all interacted with each other in their natural environment. We got to see fish in the stream actually swimming and laying eggs, which were something, we had never paid attention to before and I didn’t write about it before. Makiki Stream this time had a lot more plant life then it had before and the plants seemed to have taken over the stream more because now it was like they were growing everywhere instead of just up on the high grounds. More plants were growing inside the water and it seemed like the flourished there too because those plants were growing pretty big. I think that the increase in plant population may have come from a decrease in bird population because I don’t recall seeing even a single bird in our studies this time so knowing what I do we should expect a sharp increase in bird population and then we should expect it to go back down after all the plant resources are gone. So for my hypothesizes I am going to make them about the plant life at Makiki Stream because that is my unit of study. Hypothesis #1: If we measure the average height of the plants growing in the water and out of the water then we will see that the ones growing out of the water will be taller because they will have more firm soil to plant their roots in and their nutrients will not get washed away by the stream’s current. Hypothesis #2: If we take two plants growing at Makiki Stream and give one of them stream water for a month and one of them fresh water for a month and give them equal amount of sunlight, then we will see that the one getting fresh water will grow faster because fresh water is better for plants than having all the bacteria from the stream. Hypothesis #3: If we take a plant that was growing in the stream an move it to land then it will grow better on land because it will get more nutrients from the soil and more sunlight because it is higher up then how it was when it was planted in the stream.

Assigned Journal #3

/---\ /-\ /--\ / Birds eat those insects and gain energy from them \ /--\ / Insects eat the trees and use energy that they got from them \ /-\ / plants and trees of Makiki Stream do photosynthesis \ /-\

This is an energy pyramid for Makiki Stream and because I don’t have a scanner I had to make it using lines but it tells how the energy starts in the plants and the moves up to insects after they eat the plants and then finally ends ad the birds after they eat the insects. The lines math up on my word document and I couldn't get it to match up on here so I can show you that if you want.

Free Journal #4 In this final time that I went to makiki stream I noticed some things that I actually hadn’t seen before because I was specifically looking at the plants earlier while this time I looked at the thing as a whole and how the whole ecosystem worked together to be successful. I first noticed that the water of the stream was cleaner in some places then others and that made me wonder why. I personally think that it was because the water was flowing harder and that made the sediments and the dirt get washed away in places where they didn’t normally move all that much. Also, during this visit I conducted my experiment, and the results honestly didn’t surprise me too much. The procedures of my experiment were to measure the heights of five plants that were in the water and to also measure the heights of five plants that were living outside the water and to then compare the heights of them and to see if plants grew better inside or outside the water. The data was pretty balanced in that the plants in the water all had a pretty similar height to each other and the plats out of the water all had relative heights to the other plants that grew by them. As you can see from my data table and graph there isn’t a HUGE difference in the size of the plants but it is quite noticeable and I found it pretty interesting that the plants would grow like that. Some conclusions that I draw from my experiment are that plants need firm ground to put their roots in or else they may get washed away by the rain or in this case the water of a rushing river. I also think that the rushing water hurt them more then helped them because it also may have washed away some of the vital nutrients that they need in order to survive and prosper. I think that these plants just got the basic nutrients and not anything extra that would help them to grow tall and strong. I think that the plants that actually did grow good on the side of the river got an extra boost because they still got enough water to survive and their nutrients didn’t get taken from them. By knowing this I conclude that in the future we should expect that there would be in increase in plants out of the water and a decrease in those that live in the water because the ones that live on the outside have a small but definite advantage over the other ones.

Assigned Journal #4 is right above this line