How does ocean acidification affect us?
As the ocean becomes more acidic due to human interaction such as rising carbon dioxide levels, the environmental and habitats of sea animals such as clams, crabs, lobsters, etc worsen with the increasing amount of acidic water. This affect us because we are known to eat those sea animals so if something bad happens to them, then the effects will be passed on to us as well and the number of those animals for us to eat diminish as well.
Would we study kelp at the Botany lab? Why or why not?
I'd say that we'd study kelp at the Botany lab in order to further learn about the plants' capabilities to counteract ocean acidification. We already know that seaweed and kelp contains bacteria that fend off toxic algae, toxins that can kill fish and contaminate drinking water; so why not lean more about the plant to learn more about it's benefits? Kelp is a natural way of potentially solving these problems so it'd be worthwhile to study more about them.
In what ways is growing kelp beneficial to the environment and economy?
After reading the article, I learned various ways that kelp is beneficial to the environment and economy. Kelp have bacteria that can counteract/prevent harmful toxic algae which are detrimental to other fish and can even contaminate drinking water. It can also "generate sustainable energy and food while preserving scarce fresh water for humans" and has been known to absorb nitrogen found in various waterways besides the ocean such as lawns, farms, etc. Best of all, "kelp requires no feed, no fertilizer, no arid land and no fresh water." making kelp very easy to attain for the benefits aforementioned or research.
Describe what you did this week during your internship (This first part is a given during any week! So write this on your blog posts every week). Do you know why you're doing these tasks? What is it for?
During my first two days of my internship (I was absent on Thursday to attend a trip to the NY Hall of Science), I began my first step of the greater picture of what I am doing in my internship as a whole. Richard, a member of the collections space, taught us the procedures of mounting specimens. Dr. Sweeny prepared a big stack of specimens ranging from plants found in Madagascar to South America, in which the 3 of us would be able to mount by the end of the day.
As I said above, mounting the specimens is the first step to the overall picture of the internship. The overall picture is to aid Dr. Sweeny and his lab in digitizing a large majority of the Peabody’s Botany Collection to an online database so researchers around the world have access to different specimens to study off of. I can only predict that as the internship goes on, Dr. Sweeney or someone in the lab will teach us how to catalogue the specimens or upload them online to the database.
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