For my final project, I decided to learn as much as I could about bioluminescence in Sea Creatures. As I was doing my research, I came across a post about my topic on a blog. I had information that interested me, so I included some of their facts in my website. I also had some other information that I thought the author may like to know about bioluminescence, and I even asked some question that came across my mind while reading his post. Unfortunatley, I was not able to take a screen shot of my comment because it has to be approved by the author before it will show up on the blog post. Luckily, I saved my comment in a word document before submitting. So, here is the link to the blog post and the comment that I submitted.
“Over the past six weeks or so, I have been researching bioluminescence for a school project and I came across this website. I thought you did a great job explaining about how dinoflagellates are used for the ‘burglar-alarm system.’ You may already know, but the same ‘burglar-alarm system’ is used by sea animals that can emit bioluminescence without consuming dinoflagellates. The emitting of light is caused by a chemical reaction which is then converted into light energy. This makes it possible to divert attention to an animal’s (who can creates light) predator, in effect causing another animal to hunt it leaving the original prey safe. In comparison, it has the same ending effects as when predators consume dinoflagellates but it repels predators in two different ways. But I do have a question; what happens to dinoflagellates after they are consumed by an animal, and that animal is consumed by a predator? Is it a chain reaction making each predator emit light leaving it vulnerable to another predator?
I would also like to recommend a TED talk that a woman named Edith Widder gave. She shows evidence that she recorded on camera of the ‘burglar-alarm system’ in effect. Here’s the link: www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/edith_widder_glowing_life_in_an_underwater_world.html.”
I chose to contribute to this particular blog post because I had gained some useful information from it and I felt that I had some interesting information to give back. That blog post kept me thinking and I wanted to continue the conversation to see what else I could learn, and maybe what else I could teach.
I thought that contributing this was very easy. Mostly because we had practiced in class what it takes to become a good commenter, and how to create conversations. It was easy to write more than a one or two sentence response because that’s what I was used to and I really enjoy learning about bioluminescence. If you can easily talk to someone about a topic you’re researching, then you know you picked one that means something to you. I wasn’t at all timid because there were some things that I just needed to know more about, which made it easier to ask some questions that I had. To prepare for contributing, I needed to make sure I knew as much as I could in the time that I had and that my facts were correct. When you feel like you know a fair amount about your topic, it’s not so bad talking to others about what you’ve found and what you think.
