McGraw's aquaponics a hit
in the classrooms
Photo courtesy of St. Ferdinand School
Gordy Gotsch, McGraw’s director of fisheries research and management, is bringing “Aquaponics the McGraw Way” into classrooms across Chicagoland.
Building on our existing aquaponics program, Gordy has designed a low-cost aquaponics system that teachers can use to instruct pupils in biology, ecology, agriculture and chemistry, among other topics. Working in concert with the McGraw Foundation, he
installed three systems
in schools last year, and this fall he installed them at St. Ferdinand School in Chicago and St. James Catholic School in Belvidere.
What’s more, Gordy is the star of a new instructional video on building the McGraw aquaponics system. You can watch it
here
.
Going forward, Gordy hopes to bring more lessons learned at the Ken Wegner Family Aquaponics Center to students. It’s another example of how McGraw leads the way in science and education.
“It is extremely gratifying to see the excitement and enthusiasm of the students and teachers when we install an aquaponic system in their classroom or science lab,” Gordy said.
“The goal is not for classes to merely raise fish and plants but incorporate and apply aquaponics to different subjects such as biology, chemistry, mathematics, conservation, ecology, sustainable agriculture. I’m really excited to bring this opportunity to schools throughout Chicago and Northern Illinois.”
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Chicago’s Shedd working to save coral reefs
By Steve Johnson/Chicago Tribune
Photo by USFWS/flickr
Wetsuit still zipped up to his neck from an earlier dive, Ross Cunning stands amid dozens of chunks of coral in the saltwater live well on board the Coral Reef II, the research vessel owned by his employer, Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium.
He’s a research scientist by trade, but his tools at the moment are decidedly low-tech. Cunning has zip ties. He’s got long-line clips, the quick-release fasteners used on deep-sea fishing rigs. Temporarily oblivious to his Bahamian coastal surroundings or the steady rocking of the 80-foot boat, he is attaching the live coral fragments to the rungs of ladderlike structures he and his team made out of PVC pipe and cord.
Metaphorically, the animals are canaries in the climate-change coal mine. Literally, they are staghorn coral, each about 5 inches long, each destined to be moved via the racks to an open-ocean underwater nursery as part of the researcher’s experiment to identify the hardiest, most heat-resistant corals, knowledge made desperately necessary by Earth’s ever-hotter seas.
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The year all the scallops died in Peconic Bay
By Charity Robey/New York Times
Photo by Secret Pilgrim/flickr
You could tell it was going to be a bad scallop season just by looking in the parking lot of the Shelter Island Yacht Club.
When the scallops are abundant, gulls pluck them from shallows, drop them on the macadam from a height, and swoop down to eat the meat from the cracked shell. This October, for the first time in years, the yacht club parking lot was not carpet-bombed with scallop shells.
Sure enough, when bay scallop season opened on that Monday, the baymen of Long Island brought news. Most of the adult scallops in Peconic Bay were dead.
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What’s a living whale worth? Millions
By Ben Guarino/Washington Post
Photo by jdegenhart/flickr
A great whale is worth $2 million. The size of that number so terrified Ralph Chami, the economist who appraised the whales, that he sought refuge in a church for the first time in 30 years. Inside St. Matthew’s Cathedral in the District, a few blocks from Chami’s office at the International Monetary Fund, the economist said he had “a conversation with the Maker. I said: ‘If you aim to humiliate me, there are other ways of doing it.’ ”
Chami had, after all, veered outside his lane to make a first-of-its-kind claim. He studies macroeconomic policies in developing countries, not ecology. After deleting his whale calculations three times, and three times arriving at the same answer, Chami enlisted an IMF researcher, Sena Oztosun, as well as two outside economists, Thomas Cosimano and Connel Fullenkamp.
They consulted whale scientists and research papers. The world population of whales is worth more than $1 trillion, the researchers concluded in a
recent report
, because of whale tourism, the nutrients whales disperse and the carbon captured by their massive bodies.
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"Many human beings say that they enjoy the winter, but what they really enjoy is feeling proof against it."
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To read past McGraw Reports click
here.
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