1. You have read that inorganic fertilizers contribute to water pollution and would like to make a switch from inorganic fertilizers to organic compost in your vegetable garden. A friend graciously gives you a truck load of his compost. As a good researcher and critical thinker you are not convinced that organic compost will yield the same results as the inorganic fertilizer you have used for years with good results. To draw your own conclusion based on scientific evidence you decide to conduct an experiment in your garden. State a good hypothesis, design an experiment (include test subjects, sample size, control(s), dependent and independent variables, type of data collected) and hypothetical results/conclusion. Does your conclusion support the hypothesis?
2. The habitat of one species of tropical fish is red coral reefs. The large majority of the fish in this population are red. A few individual fish carry a mutation that prevents the production of the red pigment; as a result these individual fish are white. The temperature of the ocean where these fish live gets warmer and warmer over a 10 year period, and as a result the coral is bleached and turns white. Use what you have learned about natural selection to explain how this bleaching event may have affected the evolution this fish population (not including possible direct effects of warmer temperatures on the fish). Include the following terms in your explanation: differential reproduction, beneficial trait, allele frequency, selection pressure, and evolution.
Describe the major land biome where you live. How have human activities changed the landscape and how has this affected native species? Include specific examples.
3. You scoop up a water sample from a local pond nearby, because you are curious about the possible microbes that might live there. After looking at several slides that held drops of the sample, you noticed two different kinds of cells: One kind was very small and had no separate internal structures; the other kind was much larger, and it contained several kinds of internal structures that were physically different from each other. Please name each cell and briefly describe their overall similarities and differences.