Mercury in the Environment

Sarah provided you with an overview of how mercury affects biota. Here is a good USGS article that provides you with a review of the points that Sarah made.

Here is a question to test your understanding of some of these issues: Would you expect mercury to have a bigger impact on loons or on chickadees? Why?

-- Bill

Island Biogeography

One of the things that Sarah and I emphasized today is that Acadia National Park is almost all islands. We are on Big Moose Island here at SERC. In fact, the area where we will hike tomorrow is the only part of the Park that isn't an island.

Take a look at this article on "island biogeography." Island biogeography is a theory about biodiversity developed by one of the world's foremost biologists, E.O. Wilson.

After you read the article, try to answer some of the following questions:

• What does this have to do with Acadia National Park?
• Give an example of how island biogeography could affect the Schoodic part of Acadia, even though some of it isn't an island.
• Think about some of the "megafauna" that people come to Acadia to see -- moose, bears, and so on. How does E.O. Wilson's theory connect to the Park's mission to conserve such species?

Post your answers as comments to this posting. Or, if you have more write about the topic, start a new posting of your own.

-- Bill

Connecting the Hike with Geochemistry

As we took our walk in the rain out to Schoodic Point and over to Blueberry Hill today, we pointed out a number of things about the terrain, plants, and general environment. You no doubt noticed some things on your own.

How do the things that we noticed while out hiking connect in to the watershed chemistry issues that Sarah described this morning? In answering this, take a particular observation and tie it into the picture of watershed chemistry for this coastal area. We recognize that your answers are really just hypotheses at this point -- these are not things that you would necessarily be certain about. So, state some hypotheses connecting what you saw, heard, and smelled with the geochemistry that Sarah talked about.

You can post your answers as comments to this post.

-- Bill