Over the past week, I finished my research phase of my ocean plastics inquiry. After finishing up my research, I now feel that I have a solid background on ocean ecosystems and I will now be able to create my simulation based off of my research. I focused this week's research on the impacts of plastic and I found several resources that I read off of and watched videos of, in order to better understand the impacts that plastic has on the ocean. The research phase has helped me to understand the direct impacts that plastic has on the ocean. When plastic gets in the ocean ecosystem, many problems can occur, including: plastic getting into the food web, animals colonizing on plastic causing the floating plastic to take the organisms to areas they do not naturally inhabit, and chocking, strangling, or cutting animals. I also focused on learning about possible solutions to the problem. These possible solutions include: preventative measures such as legislation banning single-use plastic, reducing the problem by cleaning up beaches, recycling and reusing plastic for new purposes, and changing our habits to not include as many single-use plastic products in our daily lives. At the end of my inquiry, I will revisit these solutions and learn more about what solutions will work best to fix our problems with ocean plastics.
All of my current research can be found by clicking here to view my research document. You can also watch the video at the top of this page that briefly explains the overview of the problems that humans face due to ocean plastics.
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Overview of my InquiryIn this inquiry I hope to learn about how our ocean ecosystems work, the effect of ocean plastics on our oceans, and what we can do to lessen the effects of ocean plastics, through research. Once I have my background knowledge, I hope to be able to take what I learned and model it in a programmed biological simulation using starlogo nova, which is a programming language. My simulation will be able to vary the amount of plastic that reaches the oceans, the toxicity of the plastics to the ocean life, and the amount of ocean creatures in order to take data from the simulation on how ocean plastics affect ecosystems and what makes a healthy ocean ecosystem. Once I finish working on the simulation I will write up a summary explaining what I learned and connecting it back to what we can do to help our ocean ecosystems. Through this, I will be learning about scientific writing.
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