Hello Students!

Welcome to class. I’m happy you will be joining me this Spring as we learn more about how the natural world works and how humans are impacting nature everyday.  I’m your instructor Crystal Peirce.  I’ve been working at Harper since 2008, first as an adjunct instructor and then full-time about 5 years ago.  In addition to being an Assistant Professor in the biology department, I am also the department chair.  I received my undergraduate degree in biology at Illinois State University and my Master’s degree in Biodiversity, Conservation, & Policy at SUNY-Albany.  I’ve been married to my husband for 14 years and we have 2 elementary school aged boys, both of whom are very involved in youth sports.  We have a few pets including a scruffy puppy (he’s really 12) named Toby and about a dozen guppies that my boys mostly look after.  I’m looking forward to learning more about all of you through your introductions and throughout the course of the semester.  Let’s get started!

Welcome back to campus students!  This is the first time since Spring of 2022 that this class is fully back on campus.  We will meet in-person for both lecture and lab with full lab classes this fall.  I am excited to be back to a bit of “normal” after many semesters of uncertainty and change.  And while the pandemic is in no way over (and other viruses are becoming more prominent in our communities), I am cautiously optimistic for a great semester.

A few reminders as we come together in-person to learn.

• First, please feel free to wear a mask during both lecture and lab. Our lecture hall is fairly large and there is room to spread out – utilize as much space as you need to feel comfortable.  In lab you will be sitting at 4 person tables, but there is about 3 feet of space between you and your neighbors.  During the beginning of the semester, we will spend quite a lot of time outdoors during lab.
• As COVID-19 continues in our community, it is important to notify me if you test positive.  Please stay home and do not come to class, even if you are not experiencing any symptoms.  Harper has a form you will need to submit if you test positive.  CDC quarantine guidelines should be followed.
• In the event we are unable to have in-person lecture or lab, I will provide guidance and assignments on Blackboard.  Please regularly check your Harper email for updates.

You all will be blogging this semester as well.  Each week you will either post on your own blog or reply to someone else’s blog.  Your blog is personal – you can write anything you want, as long as it pertains in some way to this class.  Did you visit somewhere great outdoors and want to share pictures?  Did you see a documentary or show on a streaming service and it relates to what we are learning?  Do you follow someone on social media whose content is relevant to this class?  Share anything and everything.  For some ideas, you can look at example posts on my blog.

I haven’t used this blog site since the last time my classes were on campus.  I’m going to keep all the previous posts so you can read through them if you would like.  New posts will appear at the top of this page.

Can’t wait to meet you all in class next week!

As I’m reading through the blogs, a few of you have mentioned how you wish you were able to check up on your ecosystem jars.  As it turns out, I finally had the chance to go to campus today and do a little cleaning up in our lab.  I spent most of my time cleaning out the jar ecosystems.  Many of the jars were a great success!  I found lots of snails still alive and at least one jar had quite a few swamp scuds swimming around.  The plants, both elodea and some duckweed, did very well in the jars.  Even though these jars were a good month over due, many of them continued to function as mini-ecosystems.  Well done!

I wasn’t able to take a picture of every jar, but I did capture a few of them:

In these jars you can clearly see both types of snails (pond snails were the big ones, ramshorn were the little ones) as well as the green elodea.  These jars did not contain any other macroinvertebrates, but the snails did well.

These jars had a little more decomposition than the first two.  You can tell because the water is a little more cloudy and you can see debris both at the top and the bottom of the jar.  Both still had at least one snail that survived.

So I managed to clean out 23 jars today.  There were quite a few jars that had completely brown water with a lot of decomposition and no living macros.  I didn’t take pictures of those jars.  But why only 23 jars and not 24?  Well, that’s because there was one jar I just couldn’t get the lid off.  So until someone with more grip strength than I have can come and take the lid off this jar for me, it’s going to stay in the lab for awhile.  This also happened to be the jar with the most macros in it!  I counted at least a dozen swamp scuds.  The water is pretty cloudy, but I’m not sure if that’s from the stick decomposing or if its an accumulation of microalgae in the jar.  That big guy in the middle is one of the scuds!

Sorry you all didn’t get to see the outcome of this lab yourselves, but know that you are capable of creating your own ecosystems!  Well done everyone!

Here are examples of a few posts some of my students created for their blog for a different class I teach.  Use them to give you ideas on how to create your own blog post.  Add pictures, links, audio, etc. to make it your own.  The idea is to share your perspective with the rest of the class.  Make it personal, make it about you and your learning.  Good luck!

Student 1:

“Looking more into the environment I never knew that there are many different aspects of life that affect the environment affects the many different ecosystems of the world. By watching the video in class about the endangered birds and plants, it is odd to think that the removal of another species can greatly increase the chances of increasing species, like for example of the rats and hedgehogs being seen as a problem. With the weekly assignments, I thought it would be fun to learn more about birds in the ecosystems and what their rolls are in the environment. From learning that they are seen to be a good source for food, and with farming and taming them for poultry, to they are ideal pets for some people, to their feathers being a good use to fill pillows and more. To more interesting things like their rolls with scientists and how they are used to help detect West Nile and other harmful diseases that mosquitoes can carry across the globe. With today being Earth Day and the weather was really nice, I decided that I would get out my bike, pump some air into the tires and ride out to go to lunch, then spend a good chunk of time outside in the warm sun and actually read a book. Actually once summer comes around I actually want to stay outside more often, and maybe go hiking, and camping with the family or my friends. Maybe even ride my bike more often since I rarely have done it the last couple years.”

Student 2:

“During this week we discussed the importance of saving endangered species in different ecosystems. I thought it was very interesting to learn how certain species are so crucial to the cohesiveness of an ecosystem. I think it’s super important that since we now know how each species rely on others to survive that we actively work to save endangered or threatened species. By doing so we must actively engage in activities to save our earth as well as our species by implementing policies to save our land and not exploit for deforestation purposes such as palm oil plants. Palm oil especially makes me angry because people know the severity of its pain to the animals that are indigenous to these areas yet they still barge in and destroy their homes. Palm oil after all is not crucial to the survival of humanity so therefore it should not be used as a means of destruction to another species. I think that this points to another way in which man has overstepped his boundaries with mother earth and is hurting several natural ecosystems. If these forests continue to be destroyed animals will become extinct and will ultimately lessen the quality of our lives on this earth so I believe we should choose to be proactive and stop the exploitation now. Especially because it’s earth day right? I just wish people valued every day as earth day and treated it with the importance that it should be. We only have one earth and we definitely can’t move to mars once we kill this planet.”

Hello Everyone!
My name is Crystal Peirce and I am an Assistant Professor in the biology department at Harper College. I have been teaching at Harper for 14 years now (wow!) and in addition to teaching, I enjoy cooking, traveling (or I used to), HGTV, and my family. I am a mom to two boy who are 10 and 7.

Create your own blog by signing up here on Edublogs and add yourself to this class by clicking on “My Class” then “Join a Class” search using my email address (cpeirce@harpercollege.edu) or my blog username (bioharperpeirce). Your blog will then be visible on the class page and you will be able to see and comment on other student’s blogs as well.