Friday, April 29, 2016

Your Inner Fish Reflection

In Your Inner Fish, it explains about the relationships between humans and fish, the evolution of fish, the characteristics of fish, and how fish formed other decendants. We have many things in common which includes bony skeleton, backbones, skulls, and the connection between other species. The characteristics of fish is that they have a one bone, two bone and multiple bones pattern. Throughout this movie, scientists have researched and discovered about the characteristics of fish that had passed on to humans. This includes Dr. Jenny Clark's discovery in Greenland when she found a transitional Ichthestega and its movement. Another discovery was found by Dr. Neil Shubin and Dr. Ted Daeschler when they found a shoulder girdle of a fish that belonged to the stegas by a Pennsylvania highway and it showed how fish moved long time ago. Dr. Shubin also studied embryos and found out that they look like human ones and the last discovery made in the movie was Cliff Tabin's study of chick embryos and showed limb development and the "Sonic Hedgehog" gene which told different cells to do different jobs like growing limb like digits in chickens. Tiktaalik was a an important role in the decendants of fish. Their limbs helped form amphibians with eight fingers, reptiles that colonized land, primates that traversed through the trees and form the human hand. This relates to chordates vodcast as it explained about each taxonomy and its charateristics of species that are included in each type of taxonomy of chordates. The taxonomy for chordates is Agnatha, condricthyes, osteichyes, amphibia, reptilla, aves, and mammalia.

11. What is the "Sonic Hedgehog" gene responsible for?
A protein in the mammalian signal pathway called hedgehog. Mutations in the human sonic hedgehog gene cause holoprosensephaly type 3, a disorder in which the forebrain of the embryo fails to develop and results a loss of the ventral midline. Recently, the Sonic Hedgehog gene has been shown to act as a axonal guidance cue, a subfield to neural development that concerns the process of neurons sending out axons to reach correct targets.
14. What did Tiktaalik use its neck for in the water?
It uses it neck to help hunt for prey. It also helped support its body and help breathe.

Friday, April 15, 2016

Jellyfish

Jellyfish are a non polyp individuals that belong to the phylum, Cnidaria. This relates to the invertebrates vodcast because it's a animal from Cnidaria and share many traits of a Cnidaria. They are free swimming marine animals that have a bell shaped like an umbrella and have stinging tentacles that can kill prey. Jellyfish have occurred for at least 500 million years and are the oldest multi organ animal alive. There are four classes of jellyfish that belong to the Cnidaria. They are scyphozoa, cubozoa, hydrozoa, and staurozoa. There are 200 species of scyphozoa, 20 species of Cubozoa, 50 species of staurozoa and 1000-1500 species of hydrozoa jellyfish. The unique part of a Jellyfish is that they are useful for many resources that we use today. They are used for an appetizers that are served in restaurants. They are prepared by putting sesame oil and chili sauce. Another part of a Jellyfish that make them unique is that their glowing goo can be used to power medical devices. Their digestive, circulatory, respiratory, nervous and osmoregulatory are not very specialized. Jellyfish's bell height can range from a millimeter to two meters tall and their lifespan is from a few hours to several months.