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Summer Selfie Favorites

You have no doubt seen the Snapchat My SF Story in which I was learning to take selfies. Uhhhh some would say that I am Snapchat famous now but I'm just a simple AP Biology teacher just trying to see what my students experience when they are working on their summer homework.

This is a picture of me and some pelicans at Baum Lake in Cassel, California. In the background you can see the pelicans and a rowing man who both spend many hours on the water. The pelicans are much more adept at moving through the water in comparison to the human using the oars to push his hydrodynamic old boat through the blue-green algae laden waters of the glistening Baum Lake. This picture meets the requirement for the BIRD on our selfie scavenger hunt list but it could also meet a variety of other requirements as well but that would be cheating and
when you are APeezy you don't do that!

Here I am at Mt. Lassen National Park which happens to be the least visited but most amazing of the National Parks. I love it because there is so much to see even if you don't go on long exhausting hikes. We drove through the park and stopped at a variety of sites shown on the map. I have included a few more awesome pictures just to show how magnificent this place is. The selfie above shows me with a couple of trees that have Wolf Lichen on them. In the picture below you can see it more closely. This meets the requirement for the MUTUALISM EXAMPLE because in mutualism both organisms benefit from the interaction and lichen actually is a fungus and algae growing together in a symbiotic relationship as explained by the ranger on the display pictured below.

This tree is covered in lichen.

Here I am pictured In front of a classic example of SECONDARY SUCCESSION, which is the return of the larger organisms like the pine trees you see in the background . In 1915, Lassen Peak erupted destroying everything in the path of the molten lava. It has taken 100 years but it would appear that secondary succession has been completed.

It has been fun working on my Summer Selfie Project and I had the opportunity to look more closely at the places I have visited as I searched for pictures of the required items for the assignment. Sometimes when I am moving too fast through the environment, I don't always pay attention to what I am seeing. This activity forced me to really see my surroundings and appreciate it's inherent beauty.

Congratulations on making the brave decision to join AP Biology at PHS. You will soon discover why it is known as the "toughest class you will ever love". This class keeps getting better, we make improvements in the course every year so while there are many consistent features, there are definitely changes and additions. This blog is one of those changes. As we learn to blog as a class and make this a useful tool, it is critical that you participate in this forum, follow the rules and make suggestions to increase the usefulness of this communication tool. You will be posting lab results and responses to a number of assigned topics. We have many ways to communicate with one another so this blog will focus on content that is useful to share with others. In many ways this will be a portfolio of your work throughout the year and it will serve as an electronic lab notebook as well.
Thank you for viewing my first ever blog post and feel free to respond.
StayAPeezy,
Ms. Moreno