EXPERIMENT 2, Study notes of Ecology and Environment

Download EXPERIMENT 2 and more Study notes Ecology and Environment in PDF only on Docsity!

EXPERIMENT 2

Huddling

a behavioural adaptation

Emperor penguins huddles

• Emperor penguins form large huddles to keep warm. It’s a behavioural adaptation.
• Show video

Experiment

• In this experiment, test tubes of hot water are grouped together as a model of penguins in a huddle.
• The decrease in temperature over time is compared to a lone test tube of hot water.

Resources needed

• Test tubes or boiling tubes.
• Beakers (to stand the huddled test tubes in).
• Elastic bands.
• Thermometers.
• Stopwatches.
• Kettles.

Method

• Boil water in a kettle.
• Each group needs 8 test tubes.
  • 7 test tubes are arranged into a group, with one test tube at the centre, this can be secured with an elastic band and placed in a beaker to hold it upright.
  • The other is kept on its own.
• Pour equal amounts of boiling water into the test tubes and start the timers.
• Place the Thermometers into the lone test tube and the test tube at the centre of the huddle.
• Take the temperature every minute for a period of time such as 12 minutes.

Advices

• Be carefull when handling hot water
• Star the measurements of tempetarure as soon as posible after pourign the water.
• You are going to work in groups of 3. You have to be coordinated (the water is cooling rapidly): - Student 1 measures the time. - Student 2 measures the temperature in the lone test tube. - Student 3 writes the results down. - You have to repeat the process with the test tube which is at the center of the huddle.

Presenting results

• These results can be presented as a line graph of time vs temperature with two data sets (one for the huddled test tube and one for the one test tube).

Improvements

• A suggested improvement would be to repeat the experiment to get more reliable results.
• Taking the investigation further could be to increase the size of the huddle to get an additional set of data.