Since 2016, UAA has hosted an annual science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) day for the community--and this year was one of the largest turn-outs ever with over 1500 people attending!
Scientists from UAA, community partners, and organizations hosted over 20 booths and offered hands-on activities related to robotics, earthquakes, Alaska wildlife, DNA, human anatomy, wind power, and so much more to share with families, friends, and students.
This year, our lab was excited to share information and activites related to BIO-LOGGING! In collaboration with the Causey Lab, visitors got to see the wide range of tags and technology we use to understand where animals are going and what they are doing when we can't observe them directly! On the terrestrial side of things, we first compared the teeny-tiny tags with built in solar panels that are used to study owl movements in urban areas to the large collars used to monitor moose-movements.
Things get a bit trickier in marine environments! Visitors got to see the different designs and strategies for tracking animals that come to the surface to breathe, vs. deep sea animals like Pacific sleeper sharks. Unlike the raptor tags that can get a GPS location every 2ish hours, for some of our marine tags, we have to wait over a year to get any data back.
But the data is so worth the wait! Visitors got a chance to see how important this technology is for animal conservation and ecology. Kids even tried their hand at predicting the journeys different species make, and compared their maps to the data we actually got back from our tags.
Can't wait to do it again next year!
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