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On the 2nd of March, I attended a discussion at the Teen Science Cafe titled Expedition: Antarctica. This was a presentation led by Alex Rothburg, an ichthyologist who had visited Antarctica and had many exciting experiences to share. He talked about how studying death was a way of studying life, and how important it was to study death of animals in the past to better understand life cycles and evolution for the future. We played Extinction Bingo, which was a game of bingo using many vocabulary words, ranging from beginner level words (global warming) to more advanced words and concepts, such as the formation of acid rain and different types of evolution.

I learned that when a food web begins to be disrupted in an ecosystem, it creates a chain effect and possibly a positive feedback loop that continues to damage the ecosystem. An example would be water temperature rising forcing the fish to leave a certain ecosystem and migrate to one that is more suitable, depleting the food supply for the predators that fed on that fish, thus depleting the number of predators, and so on.

Specific references to global warming (a current issue), evolution, extinction, endangered species, and ecosystems made the showcase both enlightening and related to the material we have learned in APES.