Science Fair Project Ideas

[thejrc]

he he Caleb's our local genious are you kidding!

Do the taxonomy project man, it's up your alley!

 

[Caleb Kruse]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=10629346#post10629346 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by thejrc
he he Caleb's our local genious are you kidding!

Do the taxonomy project man, it's up your alley!

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=10627670#post10627670 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by thrillreefer
1) You rock, little man. I am freshly out of college and wish I had half the drive you do to analyze captive reefkeeping.

Whatever you choose, you are a badass. Keep up the good work

Thanks!

 

[thrillreefer]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=10623057#post10623057 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by greenbean36191
There is a big crisis in coral taxonomy right now. Historically, it's almost all been based on skeletal structure, but now we're realizing that that can be fairly plastic. There is a lot of talk about how what we thought were several hundred distinct species may actually just be a handful of morphologically plastic species. The answer would have a major impact on how the effort of reef conservation is divided.

You could take frags of corals from common parent colonies and grow them out under different flow, light, or nutrient regimes (I would go with flow) and then do a statistical analysis of the variation between all the characters used to identify that genus (Acropora and Montipora would be good choices). You could determine how many of the characters used for identification are consistent and how many are too variable to be of use and use that to make an assessment of the utility of morphological taxonomy in corals.

Or, you could just do this and then analyze the genetics of the colonies. Since you seem interested in coral genetics, this would be interesting for you to look into. Categorizing species genetically would be a hell of a lot more definitive than morphological characterization anyway. Since I work in a biology lab, I'd be willing to try to work out protocols for extracting and analyzing coral DNA. DNA is fairly easy to work with, so I don't think you would run into many technical problems.

Have any coral species had their genomes sequenced? if they have, this would be a good starting place for the study.

 

[thejrc]

I know they're beginning to catalog copepod DNA to help keep track of the hundreds of thousands of species. Taxonomy of such a small creature renders this almost a must, doing this for corals just makes good sense!

Really a project like this would be split, a taxonomic study as well as DNA cataloging! This would definately give you plenty to do!

 

[Seamen 4 Life]

[violation]