Included with your order, at no additional charge, are lesson plans which you can use as a guideline for your specific needs. For example, a museum might use the lesson plans in setting up its exhibit, while teachers could tailor the lesson for their specific courses. Printed below is the first lesson that comes in the lesson booklet.
LESSON PLAN 1: USES AND IMPORTANCE OF FORAMINIFERA (Pre-lab session )
Objective: To demonstrate the biologic, environmental, geologic, and economic significance of Foraminifera micro-organisms.
Material: Foram Models
Procedure: Discuss concepts in items 1-8 using Models to illustrate diversity of Foram shells.
Item 1.
Forams are microscopic shell-producing organisms that live in all oceans at all depths. They are classified as follows:
Kingdom Protista (single-celled organisms)
Phylum Protozoa (single celled animals)
Class Rhizopoda (protozoa with thread-like pseudopods)
Order Foraminifera (shell-producing rhizopods)
Item 2.
There are more than 1000 known genera and 50,000 species, living and extinct. Approximately 10 to the one-hundredth Foram shells exist in ocean sediments and in rocks. A cubic meter of marine limestone or sediment may contain as many as four million Foram shells. The average Foram shell size is .5mm (.02"), which is the size of a period on this page.
Item 3.
Foram shells cover a larger portion of the Earth's surface than any other individual material. About half of the ocean floor consists of planktonic Forams (called "Globigerina ooze") that sank after the living organisms died.
Item 4.
Vast quantities of fossil Foram shells are found in rocks and sediments of continental land masses; having been shifted there from ancient ocean floors by geologic forces. Geologists drilling for oil and gas use fossil Forams as guides to individual layers in the Earth's crust. Forams are excellent index fossils since different species can be correlated with sedimentary layers dating back 500 million years.
Item 5.
Forams live in coastal marshes, lagoons, estuaries, and all open-ocean waters including the shelf, slope, rise, abyss, trench, and ridge zones. Benthic (bottom-dwelling) varieties are often specific to certain geographic and geochemical zones; while Planktonic (floating) varieties are often specific to climate zones (tropical, temperate, frigid). Forams are also pollution indicators in coastal waters.
Item 6.
Most Foram shells are calcareous (calcium carbonate); some are silicious (silicon dioxide), and some are arenaceous or agglutinated (silt particles cemented together to form the shell). Most Foram shells have chambers arranged in spiral or other patterns. The shell (sometimes called a "test") has protoplasmic material both internally and externally while the organism is alive.
Item 7.
Larger organisms whose shells resemble Forams are the living "chambered nautilus" and many extinct fossil cephalopods such as the ammonoids.
Item 8.
The most important uses of Forams are in:
Biology- as examples of diverse shell-producing protozoa and of evolution patterns;
Ecology- to determine oceanic environmental zones, and pollution influences in coastal waters;
Geology- to identify specific ancient marine rock and sediment layers in the earth;
Economics- to locate buried resources of petroleum, natural gas, and minerals;
Paleo-ecology- to determine ancient ocean environmental conditions of temperature, depth, salinity, and pH (acidity or alkalinity);
Academics- to prepare students to identify more complex higher organism shell elements such as sponges, corals, echinoderms, bryozoa, pelecypods, gastropods, and cephalopods.