Unit All Caught Up:
Bycatching and Design

Unit Overview

In the first lesson, Caught in the Net, students learn about bycatch—how commercial fishing nets trap large amounts of unintended and unprofitable animals while catching their target species. In the associated activity, All Caught Up, students learn about fishermen's challenge in trying to isolate a target species when a variety of animals are found in a marine habitat of interest. They discuss the large magnitude of the problem, practicing data acquisition and analysis skills by collecting and processing information to deduce target species distribution trends.

In the second lesson, Sound for Sight, the concept of echolocation is introduced as well as how dolphins use this sense to perceive environmental threats in their marine habitat, such as gillnets set by commercial fishing vessels. In the first associated activity, Can You Hear It?, students use marbles and a box made by the teacher to simulate echolocation and experience how much sound can tell us about an object. This helps to illustrate dolphins' use of echolocation, their difficulty in identifying nets, and resulting net entrapment. In the second associated activity, Your Ears Do the Walking, students play a modified game of "Marco polo" to understand the difficulty of using only the sense of sound to observe their environment. They experience an echolocation simulation by walking along a path while blindfolded. What students learn from these activities suggests the engineering approach of taking advantage of dolphins' echolocation ability in the design of bycatch avoidance methods.

Educational Standards

Each TeachEngineering lesson or activity is correlated to one or more K-12 science, technology, engineering or math (STEM) educational standards.

All 100,000+ K-12 STEM standards covered in TeachEngineering are collected, maintained and packaged by the Achievement Standards Network (ASN), a project of D2L (www.achievementstandards.org).

In the ASN, standards are hierarchically structured: first by source; e.g., by state; within source by type; e.g., science or mathematics; within type by subtype, then by grade, etc.

See individual lessons and activities for standards alignment.

Unit Schedule

• Day 1: Caught in the Net: Bycatch vs.Target Species in Ocean Fishing lesson
• Day 2: All Caught Up: Acting Out Bycatching Points of View activity
• Day 3: Radar: Using Sound for Sight lesson
• Day 4: Acting Out Echolocation: Let Your Ears Do the Walking activity
• Day 5: Echolocation Experimentation: Can You Hear It? activity

Assessment

After conducting this unit, evaluate students by the following methods:

• Lesson 1: Assign a journal reflection on the classroom discussion surrounding bycatch and its importance.
• Activity 1: Evaluate collected data related to their experimental "bycatching" percentages, conclusions drawn and comments on other methods of reducing bycatch (such as a net design, acoustic alarms, etc.).
• Lesson 2: Assign a journal reflection on how bycatch affects dolphins and how we may prevent it using our understanding of animals. Ask students to describe different gillnets, which are the most useful in preventing by-catch and which they would recommend (depending on cost, efficiency, protection of dolphins).
• Activity 2: Assign a journal reflection on how their hearing/reacting process worked/failed.
• Activity 3: Evaluate which surfaces were easiest to identify and how they could tell which surfaces were deeper than others.

Copyright

Contributors

Supporting Program

Acknowledgements

This content was developed by the MUSIC (Math Understanding through Science Integrated with Curriculum) Program in the Pratt School of Engineering at Duke University under National Science Foundation GK-12 grant no. DGE 0338262. However, these contents do not necessarily represent the policies of the NSF, and you should not assume endorsement by the federal government.