Unit 9 Reflection

In this Unit I learned about how organisms are classified. I learned about the different taxonomic levels--from largest to smallest--Domain, Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, and species. Then we went more into depth about what were the different domains and kingdoms, and what species could be classified into them. There are three domains, Archae, Bacteria, and Eukarya. Eukarya is split into 4 kingdoms, protista, animalia, plantae, and fungi. Animalia is a multi cellular heterotroph. Plantae is a photosynthetic organism. Fungi is a consumer that feed on either dead or decaying organic matter. Finally, Protista is anything that doesn't fit into the other three kingdoms. Inside these kingdoms, you can find many phylums. For an example in the Plantae, some of the phylums are angiosperms and gymnosperms. Gymnosperms are cone bearing plants and angiosperms are flowering plants. Once you keep grouping things together into smaller and smaller groups based on similar characteristics, you finally get a species. In this Unit we also learned more about evolution and how these organisms came to place and how they all became such different species. We learned that life started from unicellular organisms and gradually multicellular, and when these organisms started to adapt to their environments they developed different features, and thus new species were evolved. These species, continued to evolve with some of them dying out, and through this constant process of evolution, we have the organisms that we see today.

To enforce this idea of evolution, in this Unit we also did the What on Earth Evolved (WEE) presentations. We each got to pick one organism from the book written by Christopher Lloyd, and present on how it evolved and how it had an effect on us. I picked algae as my organism. I learned a lot about algae that I didn't know before such as it is being made into biofuels which could cut down pollution, and that it was such a crucial part of our food web. Presenting was fairly easy as I felt like I knew my material well, and I felt comfortable enough to come and talk in front of the class. If I could do it over, I would probably make more of an effort to memorize my slides, because I feel that reading off of slides does not get your information across as well as speaking does. However this was a good learning experience, and I definitely know more about public speaking and algae than I did before.

All in all, I would say this Unit was one of my favorites. I love learning about species and animals that I never knew existed. One of my favorite parts was looking at some of these animals up close. We had a collection of dissected animals in the class, and we had to identify what taxa they belonged in. I loved looking at these animals up close, especially the ones that I had never seen before.

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Here is my WEE presentation: