Life on Planet Earth Notes Thursday March 13 2014 Clicker question Tom and Daniel walk along a stream looking for the potential cause of change of stream appearance is an observation Strongly agree correct answer The town now knows what to do to clean up the stream based on Tom and Daniels information about the level of pollution in the stream being too high An experiment is needed to determine whether the cause of the poor water condition is lower than other areas of the town Strongly disagree Strongly agree Notes Video on Forests Seasonal Forests will be on next test Taiga has as many as all the worlds rain forests combined Contains a third of all the trees on earth and has so much oxygen it refreshes the entire planet Growing season can last one month all year and can take one year for a tree to become bigger than a seeding Lynx travel hundreds of miles and may never visit the same patch of forest twice very uncommon to see There are few animals that can eat conifer animals Conifer needles are filled with resin that makes them distasteful The seeds are edible but are protected with the cones the crossbill bird can get the seeds using its beak then its tongue The wolverine is a cross between a bear and a wolf the animal can eat more in one sitting than any other animal They are very bulky and large The needles can extract water from the air that rolls in from the sea The sun powers these forests for half of the year These conifers grow 10 times the rate of those in the artic and live for thousands of years California contains 3 of the largest trees one is 30 meters high which is as tall as a building These trees existed for almost 20 million years and before the Rocky Mountains were even raised More living matter in these forests than tropical Pine Martin something like a fox that feeds on squirrels Squirrels feed on the pine cones There are also a lot of birds Sequoia is the weight of 10 blue whales Bristlecone was 3000 years old when Christ was born South American have waterproof needles and their cones are a bit different and support very few animals Slenderbilled parakeets extract their seeds in the south American forest The animals in the southern forests are very small the small deer and the small cat Broad leaves support more animal life than evergreen needles bc they are thin soft and edible and let in more light there are leaf eaters and then animals that consume the leaf eaters and leaves Ducklings are 24 hours old and it s a long drop to the bottom and have to walk a mile until they are near water Cicadas emerge 17 years underground There are thousands at first and then there are billions It s the biggest insect emergence on the planet They have until dawn to complete their transformation Turtles birds skunks squirrels all feast on the cicadas This is a very good time for the other animals in the forest because each animal gets plenty In a few days they will all die and before they die they lay their eggs in the tree The nutrients from the cicadas go back into the ground which is the single largest dose of natural fertilizer in the world