Science Friday: Moths

One time, we found a caterpillar, and without looking it up, kept it alive a few days before it spun its cocoon. Finally, the day came, and out came a wasp-looking creature. What a disappointment. Last year, however, we were lucky enough to hatch a luna moth and a monarch butterfly.

William found this dead moth that looks like it's wearing camouflage:

It's a Pandorus Sphinx.

Given our wasp-like experience, I decided to look up this colorful creature before investing any time in waiting for it to cocoon and hatch. Good thing. It makes a rather plain White-marked Tussock Moth .

Science Friday Challenge

These eggs were found on the topside of a spaghetti squash. What kind are they? (P.S. I don't know the answer! Please send a link.)

Science Friday - Fungi

A walk in the woods provides a wealth of science studies for the home-based learner. As we walked, we took photos of things we found, wondering aloud if the world as we know it came to an end, could we survive in these woods? Could we find things to eat? Of course, mushrooms are easily found in the woods, but who dares to trust their knowledge of the edible ones?

Here is a photo of chicken or "chicken of the woods" mushrooms, so named because properly prepared, they have a chicken-like flavor. Supposedly, there is no other poisonous mushroom that looks like them.

I'd have to be awfully hungry to fry up some of those.

And these are Turkey Tail Mushrooms. Evidently, whomever named all the mushrooms was thinking about what they'd rather be eating than mushrooms. They aren't very appetizing, but do have a medicinal value, supposedly, (not that I'm recommending).

But one of the coolest things we found was yellow slime mold: Physarum polycephalum, a plasmodial slime mold. Can't eat that! But, what is interesting about it is that it is not a mold nor fungus. It is actually more like an amoeba, and does move, hence slime or a member of the Kingdom Protista. It eats food! It moves! Creepy. Read more here.

Science Friday Challenge

The forest floor is also host to a number of critters. Name this bug:

For really cool information on science, go to Science Friday. Leave a link in the comments for your favorite science website.

Science Friday

As a homeschooler, I am often asked about what curricula I use. For example, how do I teach science? For this subject, I am amazed that anyone can think that science can be found in a book exclusively, particularly a textbook. We use "real" books from the library and things we find in our environment mostly. I decided to make Science Friday a regular feature of my blog, inspired by one of my favorite radio shows Talk of the Nation: Science Friday and post something we've studied that week. This week: Cicadas.

Brood XIV of the seventeen year cicada is here, and while feeding chickens, William discovered them crawling out of a stump of a tree.

Once we started looking, we found they were everywhere.

Here is one shedding its brown nymph shell to become
an adult cidada with wings.

As it emerges, the cidada is white at first, with very red eyes.

William would like to comment that with the black spots, it looks very much like General Grievious (Grievous, actually but he insists it is Grievious) of Star Wars.

We found them in various stages of emergence. Here Daisy is investigating a nymph that has just come up out of the ground and is rock wall climbing to find a good place to begin its transformation. Next to it, is one that has begun splitting it's shell.

When they first come out, they are very white. An unnamed teen in our house said they were gross and they looked naked.

Having successfully gotten out of its shell, the cicada now sits and dries its wings. I wonder what process occurs to change it from the white cicada above, to the finished black cicada below.

This cicada we took back to the house to watch it "hatch". It is a very slow process. The cicadas seem to be very vunerable at this stage, as they can't really move once they start the final process. We found that the chickens loved eating them. In fact, did you know that cicadas are eaten by humans? In case you are inspired to cook up a batch, I found many recipes on the web. I can just see it now. Mom, what's for dinner? Cicada tacos. Right. Perhaps if I were starving and it was like, oh, 1100 A.D. and Kroger wasn't down the road with perfectly good chicken breasts all cleaned and ready to cook.

From the recipe: "Before you start your cooking you need to remove all the hard parts: "Before you start your cooking you need to remove all the hard parts: wings, legs and head. These parts don’t contain much of the meat either but may be very sharp, so its best to get rid of them. Right. Now, I don't eat things I have to coax out, like oysters, crab legs, etc. Call me spoiled, but I just don't visualize myself pulling the wings off of live insects and popping them in the oven on a cookie sheet for a tasty treat or frying them up in a pan. Gag. I did find a recipe for chocolate covered cicadas, which maybe would be a possibility. Nah, why spoil a good thing?

Back to science lessons, we downloaded some good diagrams and information from EnchantedLearning.com and spent the day hearing from William, "MOM. COME LOOK!" He determined that he could not climb his favorite tree without squishing cicadas, or really even walk in the grass. The most amazing thing to think about for me is that this variety of cicada laid the eggs for this brood before my kids were born, before we moved here, and when I was newly married. All done seventeen years ago on days when I was busy in my life, unknowing that 20 miles from where I lived, insects were busy preparing a science lesson for me and a little boy not yet born.