Science Sunday: How to age bivalves

This was going to be the last shell post, and then I realized I had a bit more to tell you about.

With bivalves as they get older they add new ridges.  This particular shell has an excellent example of it.  You can see the ridges very clearly.  We went through the different bivavles and looked to see if we could guess how old it was.  I thought at first that it was supposed to be one ridge per year, but that doesn’t make sense for how long they live.

 

I did some quick searches, but the best I could find is the thickness of the ridge is dependent on what sediment is in the area.  The thicker the ridge, the better the protection.

 

I had planned after this discussion to make our own “pearls,” using play dough, but discovered all of our play dough was dry hard rocks.  So, we left that part of our lesson out.

 

Here’s a few of the fun things shared this past week:

Winecup Christian Academy shared a fun solar system mobile.

 

An experiment gone wrong from Creekside Learning, you had to read her post it’s hilarious.

The Usual Mayhem has a recipe for troll boogers to go with a Harry Potter study (we’re almost done reading book 1, we are done reading it).  Now I just need to figure out a fun unit to go with the book.