Three hips Foray

Mark Broeffle

Ms. Lawrence’s class

9/25/12

The mushrooms

Today I write to my fantastic followers, telling them how not to be saying oh shroom on a mushroom foray. To start off there are many types of mushrooms about 10,000 known and 250,000 over all unknown. There are a few basic characteristics of mushrooms first being that it has pores to reproduce, they have a cap which is the top many but not all have a stalk depending if it’s a shelf mushroom, and all have either gills teeth or pore underneath containing the spores. The life cycle of fungi starts out with the roots of the fungi called mycelium which grows to the point where it can then spring a mushroom filled with pores that can reproduce asexually. Once the mushroom has grown out of the ground its spores will start to be released allowing the species to reproduce. The returning link in the process is that the spores fall to the ground and create new mycelium which creates more mushrooms. Depending on the species the time that it would take to create a mushroom from the mycelium could be a hundred years or a month to produce s fruit the mushroom.

When going on a foray You do not hurt the fungi when picking the mushroom due to the fact that the mushroom is only the fruit , like an apple on a apple tree. A clue where to find some great mushrooms are where there are many dead organisms to feed off of loggs are great for this. The best time to find mushrooms are 3 to 5 days after a rain during warm weather. once you gather your mushrooms you can take them home to eat once you identify them by using the spore print which depending on its color may help you to figure out what type it is. you can also use the shape, color, type of gills or teeth , and the type of stalk to help narrow down your search.

During my first foray I found 2 veery elaborate mushrooms. One very small the other a cluster of mushrooms that were fairly easy to identify. If I had the chance to redo the Assignment I would Spend more time on my blog post, I also would find more mushrooms so I would have an easier time finding out the mushrooms identity.

Test essay

Mark Broeffle
Ms. Lawrance's bio class
9/18/12

Are birds really dinosaurs?

    Many scholars believe that birds are the ancestors of avian dinosaurs, such as theropods. according to a recent paper I read “using proper terminology birds are avian dinosaurs.” Many other scientists are largely against this theory stating a large fossil gap between such species, and a lack of relevant data. all of this can neither be proven nor disproven, like the big bang so it is a very controversial topic. I’Il give you the facts so you may make your own educated opinion.


Birds have many similar body parts and bones as their ancestors the dinosaurs, both are actually reptiles due to the scales on their feet. along with the fact that some dinosaurs may have had feathers. The Archaeopteryx commonly known as the london specimen shows a fossil that seems to be a bridge between dinosaurs and birds.

shows of evolution from the dinosaur to the bird today. Are the london specimen found in germany showing a mix of the two species, and all of the same body parts such as the same pelvis, same wrists bone structure, their s shaped necks, and their scales on their feet. What these all show is that being smaller was a favorable trait perhaps in the ice age when food was scarce, and the growing in of feathers kept the birds better protected to the weather. In the case of the london specimen the fossil shows a bone structure of that of the modern bird having hollow bones this seems to be favorable in this case most likely allowing faster running or flight even from predators. Which in both cases allowed both to create more offspring becoming dominant .

Birds have many same bone and organ structures as reptiles showing that there must have some common ancestors. with so much controversy on the topic we may never truly know if modern day birds were once dinosaurs. The amount of data on both sides are huge.The question I leave you with is are birds actually dinosaurs?

Group I biology blog reflection

Blog reflection

Honors Biology

In my opinion group 1 in d block worked very well together during the lab, but during the presentation our group had some organizational failures. During the beginning of our lab we worked swiftly coming up with ideas, and coming up with reasons they would fail. A great brain storming group.  During our lab in my opinion we did a great job setting up our experiments, but could have used a little more practice on the microscope. Other parts of our lab that could have been better would have been better ways of taking notes on the raw data. As far as collecting samples that went very smoothly. This allowed our group to make a swift conclusion about our unknown object if it was alive or not.

                Our presentation though was well done but poorly managed in my opinion. There was not enough forethought for our presentation and most of the prep happened well we were going over the slides. Our handout should have been emailed and printed earlier. Our team should have met in the morning of to discuss how the presentation would work. The biggest thing though that went wrong was the PowerPoint, our power point was being done during the class and that made me very upset. Over all though I can say that our group did well for a first crack at Biology at Asheville school.