Hi folks. I am trying to come up with some possible ideas for a museum exhibit or hands-on science activity. Nothing is set in stone at this point so I am trying to come up with a few options to pitch. Here is what I have come up with, but would love to hear your ideas or suggestions. 1) hands-on for the adult audience: fish dissections to observe parasites; 2) exhibit for adults or children: variety of parasite slides with associated life cycles and interesting statistics/facts; 3) hands-on for kids: earthworm or insect dissection (gregarine model) with other slides and parasite related paraphernalia.
Do you folks have any ideas or suggestions? I would appreciate some additional input.
I did a parasite related outreach event at a museum and it was a great success! I am glad to hear that you are working on a similar event.
We did not have access to materials for dissection, but we did have lots of scopes and slides for looking at different parasites. The smallest kids liked to look at jars of large ascarids and tapeworms.
We had a few craft activities where we modified from "summer camp" projects. One was for little kids to make "Creatures" out of toilet paper tubes with pipe cleaners and wiggly eyes and other sorts of decorations and then glue on small pompoms on the inside or the outside to represent their "parasites". They could make and infect their own organism. We also have them line drawings of parasites and modeling clay and had them model things like Giardia. We also cut a piece of string ~30 ft long and then had a child take an end and stretch it out and tell them that humans can have tapeworms that long -- it is a quick little trick, but it keeps them engaged. For adults we had a table of museum specimens of different animals - fish, amphibians, molluscs, etc. and a collection of parasites that came from those species with different life cycle diagrams and interesting notes like behavior modification, etc.
I probably have photos of this all somewhere; I will try to find them.
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If you do pursue dissections, invertebrates (for adults and kids) might be much less likely to attract negative attention. Insect hosts or aquatic snail hosts (of trematode parasites) might be good candidates. .. easy to find, often infected, etc. I suspect we can find good instructions/protocols from people here or that we know, if you don't already have them. Be sure to ask if you go down this road...
It seems like scanning electron microscopy images might be a nice part of any visual display - the morphology of many parasites at that scale is often amazing.
There might be some interesting 3d printing options, like printing larger versions of organisms that are typically too tiny to see, making jigsaw puzzles out of them (for small kids).
Joanna Cielocha @ on
Hi folks. I am trying to come up with some possible ideas for a museum exhibit or hands-on science activity. Nothing is set in stone at this point so I am trying to come up with a few options to pitch. Here is what I have come up with, but would love to hear your ideas or suggestions. 1) hands-on for the adult audience: fish dissections to observe parasites; 2) exhibit for adults or children: variety of parasite slides with associated life cycles and interesting statistics/facts; 3) hands-on for kids: earthworm or insect dissection (gregarine model) with other slides and parasite related paraphernalia.
Do you folks have any ideas or suggestions? I would appreciate some additional input.
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Sarah Orlofske @ on
Hello Joanna
I did a parasite related outreach event at a museum and it was a great success! I am glad to hear that you are working on a similar event.
We did not have access to materials for dissection, but we did have lots of scopes and slides for looking at different parasites. The smallest kids liked to look at jars of large ascarids and tapeworms.
We had a few craft activities where we modified from "summer camp" projects. One was for little kids to make "Creatures" out of toilet paper tubes with pipe cleaners and wiggly eyes and other sorts of decorations and then glue on small pompoms on the inside or the outside to represent their "parasites". They could make and infect their own organism. We also have them line drawings of parasites and modeling clay and had them model things like Giardia. We also cut a piece of string ~30 ft long and then had a child take an end and stretch it out and tell them that humans can have tapeworms that long -- it is a quick little trick, but it keeps them engaged. For adults we had a table of museum specimens of different animals - fish, amphibians, molluscs, etc. and a collection of parasites that came from those species with different life cycle diagrams and interesting notes like behavior modification, etc.
I probably have photos of this all somewhere; I will try to find them.
Hope that helps!
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Pat Marsteller @ on
Love the dissections and the build your own ideas....might take these a step farther into citizen science?
What about some cool parasite videos, too?
http://www.serc.si.edu/labs/marine_invasions/feature_story/September_2014.aspx
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www.monarchparasites.org/
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Project MonarchHealth - Scientific American
www.scientificamerican.com › ... › Citizen Science
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Project MonarchHealth is a citizen-science survey of the occurrence of the protozoan parasite Ophryocystis elektroscirrha (OE), which parasitizes monarch ...
MonarchHealth Project - University of Georgia
monarchparasites.uga.edu/monarchhealth/index.html
About the Project. Monarch Health is a citizen science project to track the prevalence of the protozoan parasite Ophryocystis elektroscirrha (OE) in monarch ...
Citizen Science: research projects you can participate in ...
www.lepsoc.org/citizen_science.php
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www.fs.fed.us › ... › Monarch Butterfly
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pollinatorlive.pwnet.org/teacher/citizen.php
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The parasite Loxothylacus panopaei (Loxo for short) is a type of barnacle that is ... Update: Microbes collected for this project, by citizen scientists, will blast off to ...
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Jeremy M Wojdak @ on
Excellent discussion!
If you do pursue dissections, invertebrates (for adults and kids) might be much less likely to attract negative attention. Insect hosts or aquatic snail hosts (of trematode parasites) might be good candidates. .. easy to find, often infected, etc. I suspect we can find good instructions/protocols from people here or that we know, if you don't already have them. Be sure to ask if you go down this road...
It seems like scanning electron microscopy images might be a nice part of any visual display - the morphology of many parasites at that scale is often amazing.
There might be some interesting 3d printing options, like printing larger versions of organisms that are typically too tiny to see, making jigsaw puzzles out of them (for small kids).
Report abuse