Video
To make the most of your Brine Date kit, why not watch this video? It features advice on using your kit in the classroom. Find out how to set up your aquarium to allow your brine shrimps to grow successfully, and see how the experiment went down at one school in South London.
The video also shows you what fully mature brine shrimps look like so that you know what you are aiming for. We recommend watching this video before setting up your brine shrimp tank or carrying out Brine Date with your students.
Thanks to Maria Bateson and students at Sedgehill School, London, for their help in the making of this video.
Can't see this video?
This could be because you don't have Flash player installed on your machine. Flash is a free application which is quick and easy to install, taking around two minutes to download on a 56K modem.
Download Flash from the Adobe site
Transcript
Brine Date – Video Transcript
Voiceover: “Hello and welcome. Today we’re going to be finding out what catches a brine shrimp’s eye as we play Brine Date, the experiment that looks at sexual selection in brine shrimps.
“Keep watching for fantastic tips on how to get the most out of your kit, seen here being put through its paces by Sedgehill School, London.”
First girl: “We’ve been looking at brine shrimp and we’ve been looking at the mating habits of them. Mate guarding is when the male brine shrimps clasp together with the females and they hold on to them for three days straight.”
First boy: “We’re looking at things Darwin looked at about how those with better qualities would survive, so the larger shrimp maybe, possibly, mate more, produce more so then maybe that would have an effect on the future generation of shrimps.”
Second girl: “We’re trying to find out the preferences between who they mate with, to see whether or not they prefer to have them roughly the same size or to have the bigger shrimp together.”
Second boy: “I like the interaction, like, the way you ask questions and we can say what we wanted to say. The whole investigation, with the petri dishes, we’re using different equipment, like the pipettes, and we’ve actually got live shrimp, so it’s not out of a textbook, so that’s quite good.”
Mrs Bateson (interview): “The shrimps were really easy to grow actually, from the kit, because there’s some nice instructions that come with it. And when you get the box you get going straight away with the algae, because it’s a live culture, so that’ll need about a week before you start going with the eggs and hatching the brine shrimp. And that all needs to be done about four weeks prior to the lesson, so you need to keep them on a sunny window ledge where it’s fairly warm to keep them happy.
“I didn’t know very much about brine shrimp before I did this, but all the notes that came with the pack were really informative, so now I know that the males have these claspers and the females have quite visible egg sacs, and they’re quite small.”
Voiceover: “The kit really is user-friendly, you just need to be organised and get things set up in good time. The crucial thing is that the shrimps need to have reached sexual maturity, otherwise they’re not going to date.
“Your free kit contains a small plastic tank, but if you want you can use your own. Whatever you use, remember to replenish the water regularly and to feed with algae every few days. Although there’s nothing harmful in the tank, students should wash their hands after the lesson.”
Third boy: “We’re measuring the size and then plotting graphs to see what correlation they have. At the moment if we took out one or two outliers, we would have a positive correlation.”
Mrs Bateson (interview): “Whilst we were drawing the graph a lot of the students did comment to me that they would have liked to have done it with a lot more mate-guarding pairs, so that they had maybe 100 pairs to look at, and that was totally their own idea, I didn’t suggest that at all. Other students went further still and were completely independently doing statistics that they’d learned in maths on the results that we had this morning.”
Fourth boy: “I enjoyed using the magnifying glass and getting a nice, close, eye-to-eye look on the brine shrimp – that was quite good, too.”
Second boy: “I think it’s been quite awesome actually… yeah, I’m more of a doing person.”
Interviewer: “Right, so, hands on?”
Second boy: “Yeah, hands… claspers on.”
Voiceover: “This really is a great kit. All you need to do is be organised and success is guaranteed. And the added bonus is that if you keep the shrimps going they’ll be a fantastic resource for years to come.”
Mrs Bateson (interview): “They were engaged all the way through, they were asking lots of really good questions, they were talking to each other about what they were doing, developing their experimental skills and generally really, really excited about it. It was a worthwhile lesson and I would really like to take it forward and do some coursework on it as well, because they were so engaged.”
