Overview
Part 1 "Topic": Marine Microbes (Bacteria) ***pick a single species of bacteria ****
Part 2: Upload species choice (Marine Microbes (Bacteria) ***pick a single species of bacteria **** ) and 2 primary literature papers (full PDF)
Part 3 : Upload the PowerPoint/slides to blackboard.
Throughout the first part of the course, we will learn about the many different groups of organisms that live in the sea. Now is your chance to explore an individual species (or genera) in more depth, and present that to the class. This project will consist of (1) a short PowerPoint on your organism (maximum 5 slides) that you will (2) present to the class (approximately 5-minute presentation). The text of the PowerPoint must come from a minimum of 2 primary literature sources (along with background information and sources you may use in addition to that). The focus of the presentation is to give a brief description of the specific organism (species, or if you need to, genus) and how an abiotic factor of the ocean may influence the physiology of this organism. You need to choose one species and one abiotic factor and can discuss many impacts on the organism’s physiology.
For example (you can’t use this!) I choose Crassostrea virginica (eastern oyster) as my species, and Ocean Acidification as the abiotic factor, and I could talk about how ocean acidification changes oyster’s reproduction timing, growth rates, and mortality.
1. **** This is done already**** *** Marine Microbes (Bacteria) *** ***need to pick a single species of bacteria ****
After that you will need to narrow down this group to a specific species or genera.
2. Choosing your organism --> (Marine Microbes (Bacteria)) <-- and finding 2 primary literature sources.
This will allow me to see what specific organism you will be highlighting and to check that your sources are appropriate. Upload PDFs of both of your sources to Blackboard. Indicate in the ‘submission text’ area which species you are focusing on. Sources must be primary literature (detailing individual experiments) and within the previous 14 years (2024-2010).
3. Part 2: The presentation (power point) and paper
The PowerPoint slides will consist of a maximum of 6 slides. For these slides you should follow this formula:
Slide 1- Title page.
Slide 2- Species introduction.
Slide 3,4,5- Impacts of abiotic factor on the species’ physiology.
Slide 6- Reference list (this doesn’t count for your project, its just for me when grading!)
This is a short oral presentation to introduce us your organism, and how the physical ocean can affect the organism’s daily life functions. It should include lots of pictures and less words (very visual). One short (less than 1 minute) video is permitted. You only have 5 minutes, so use of video material is not strongly encouraged but if you find one that is really helpful you can use it.
Since this is short, but you need to include a lot of information, one of the hardest things will be structuring the slides. You don’t want them too wordy or full (should be visually appealing!), but you also need to have significant content on there. This means choosing meaningful conclusions from your primary research, and wording them in a way that will explain to the audience the most important impacts of the abiotic factor on the organism.
****A great idea is to write out a ‘script’ that you can read during the presentation. This way, you can convey information to the audience without having overly- wordy and crowded slides. ****
All sources used (primary and background) must be cited at least once during your presentation. You must include at least one figure/graph from one of those papers and explain it.
Formatting of slides: For any graphics used, you must cite them (where did you find the picture, graph, etc?) this information can be listed in the bottom corner of the slide in small text (its for me only to see). Otherwise, there is a lot of room for artistic interpretation for slides. Choose any format/ design you like. Remember the slides need to be legible from afar, easy to read fonts and colors work best. Lots of motion and animations are not always necessary (and don’t always transfer well when downloading from Google Slides or Canva)