This is the beaver information, taken from The Digital Field Trip to The Wetlands program.

BEAVER

Beavers are one of the largest rodents in the western hemisphere and can weigh up to sixty pounds. Their hind feet, webbed like a duck’s, make them powerful swimmers. A thick underlayer of hair keeps them warm and dry. All rodents have front teeth that never stop growing.

Hunting beavers for their fine furs has led to extinction in some areas. They now have protected status in many countries.

Habitat

Beavers spend most of their time in water. They can stay underwater for up to fifteen minutes.

They build a dome-shaped lodge to live in, using mud, rocks and tree branches. The lodge has entrances underwater, an internal platform above water level, and a place to store food underwater.

Beavers exert a great influence on their habitat by damming streams and creating ponds.

Behavior

Beavers work hard to dam streams, thus creating ponds that won’t freeze completely during the winter. They are skillful builders; if they run out of nearby wood for the dam, they build channels to float wood into the pond from further away! They create spillways in the dam, enlarge them to cope with heavy rain and build them up again in dry periods.

Beavers stay in the lodge for most of the day, then feed at dusk.

Life Cycle

Beavers give birth to 3-5 young in the Spring. The young are born with hair and their eyes open; they stay with their parents for up to two years.

Food Source

Beavers eat water plants and the bark and leaves of trees.

Range

Beavers are found in these areas:

Suggested Links

THE JAGUAR

The word “jaguar” comes from “yaguar,” meaning “he who kills with one leap.”  Also known as “El Tigre,” the jaguar is the largest cat in the New World.  A jaguar can be as long as 2 m (6 ft), and weigh over 140 kg (300 lbs).  Its only predators are the anaconda and humans.

However, habitat loss and hunting have had a dramatic effect on jaguar populations, bringing jaguars close to extinction.  The jaguar reserve in Belize is the first of its kind.

Habitat

The jaguar lives in both lowland and mountain forests, by rivers, in jungles, savannas, mangrove swamps and moist forests.  It prefers damp areas, tracking prey by their footprints.

Each jaguar lives alone, but home ranges frequently overlap.

Behavior

The jaguar is nocturnal, stalking prey silently.  Its beautiful spotted coat provides camouflage, helping it sneak up on prey.  It is a good swimmer and can turn its front paws inward to help it grab prey.

Like most cats, it has good hearing and retractable claws.  It can roar, but not purr, and its eyes close to circles, not slits.  It has excellent sight, sees color and, at night, sees six times better than a human.

Life Cycle

A female jaguar gives birth to two or three young after a three month pregnancy.

Offspring are born blind and helpless.  They stay with their mother for one year, but do not fully mature for three years and can live up to 20 years.

Food Source

The jaguar is a carnivore and hunts vertebrates.  When it attacks, it pounces on the head or neck, and attempts to snap the spine.

A jaguar eats almost everything from a kill, including most of the bones.  It uses its side teeth to chew, because the front teeth are normally weak.

Range

Jaguars can be found in the following areas…

For more information on the jaguar and other rainforest plants and animals, take a look at The Digital Field Trip to the Rainforest. Or download a free demo of the program here.

Just a reminder that to mark the occasion, we’re having a one day only, Save the Frogs Day sale.

Until midnight tonight, you can save 25% off any Digital Frog 2.5 license, plus we will donate 25% to the Save the Frogs Foundation.

Orders must be placed through our online store.

And to find out what else is going on on Save the Frogs Day, be sure to check out the Save the Frogs Day web site.

When we heard about it, we had to be involved.

For April 30 only, we’re offering 25% off the regular price of The Digital Frog 2.5 AND donating 25% of the proceeds to Save the Frogs.

While the virtual dissection portion of the program can save the need for using real frogs, the whole program is a wealth of information on amphibians, their anatomy and even a section on ecology including environmental concerns and the effects on frog populations.

Come back to The Digital Frog Online Shop on April 30 to place your order and save both money and donate to Save the Frogs organization. (If you are an educator, you can even place your order with a purchase order.)

For more information on Save the Frogs day (or to find or register your own event for the day), visit the Save the Frogs web site.

Case in point: teacher Lovelle Ruggiero not only enthusiastically came to visit us at our booth, she even helped us make a video of her thoughts and experiences using Digital Frog software in her school:

You can see this video (and our others) on the Digital Frog International YouTube channel.

Find us on Facebook

Looking for other ways to find out what we’re up to? We’ve just created a page on Facebook. Come on over, check it out, become our fan. We’re still adding content, but you can have a look at some pictures from the recent NSTA conference, as well as other things to come.

(Don’t forget, you can still find us on Twitter too.)

The Purpose of TIPS/TAPS is to:

•   Provide school districts and other governmental entities opportunities for greater efficiency and economy in acquiring goods and services.

•   Provide quick and efficient delivery of goods and services by contracting with “high performance” vendors.

•   Equalize purchasing power for smaller entities that are not able to command the best contracts for themselves.

•   Maintain credibility and confidence in business procedures by maintaining open competition for purchases and by complying with purchasing laws and ethical business practices.

•   Assist entities in maintaining the essential controls for budget and accounting purpose.

This means that members can order with confidence knowing that all purchasing requirements have already been completed during the RFP process, saving the time and expense associated with competitively bidding each purchase.

Ordering is simple:

1.    Create a purchase order (use your district’s normal procedure). Be sure to write or type in DIGITAL FROG somewhere on the purchase order. If you want product shipped by courier please include your EIN number (federal tax id) for US Customs.

2.   FAX the purchase order to TIPS/TAPS at 866-839-8472

3.   Digital Frog will apply the 10% discount and ship your order within 2-5 business days.

I’ve been trying to come up with a pithy little introduction here, but really all we wanted to share is that we’ve put together a short(ish) movie as an introduction to Digital Frog International’s educational software programs. We think it does a pretty good job explaining what you get with a DFI program, the range and depth of topics we cover and why you and your students can benefit from our software.

So grab some popcorn, but your feet up for a few minutes and let us show you what you get with a Digital Frog product. And if you’re really inspired, you can head over to our DemoWare pages to get your free demo versions to try for yourself.

(If you’ve never checked out the Digital Frog YouTube channel, you can find a growing number of videos, from sample dissection videos from The Digital Frog 2.5 to the shockingly popular time-lapse of a decomposing rabbit, with more going up in the coming months.)

In our frog dissection, anatomy and ecology program The Digital Frog 2.5, we address environmental concerns and the effects they have had on frog populations. Since we first published in 1995, new research has identified other possible causes, including urban noise and tiny parasites which have been found to cause damage to devloping limb buds.

It looks like it’s time to update the ecology section in The Digital Frog, part of which you can read here:

Introduction

Many scientists consider frogs important bio-indicators. Frogs have permeable skin and live both on land and in water. As a result, environmental problems quickly affect frogs. Recently, frog populations have declined or disappeared around the world, and deformities and mutations are becoming common. People have found adult frogs with misshapen bodies, extra legs, missing or abnormal organs, and even eyes growing inside mouths!

A Thousand Friends of Frogs

A Thousand Friends of Frogs Project was founded in 1995 to collect data on deformed frogs, and pass the information to research scientists. This project links students, educators, families, and scientists from around the world, and helps to educate people about frogs and their importance to us.

Possible causes

Frog deformities, mutations and declining populations are not likely to result from any single cause; it is much more probable that many factors affect our amphibian friends. Scientists have identified holes in the ozone layer, chemicals, pollution, habitat loss and frog harvesting as possible causes.

Ozone layer

Laboratory tests with ultraviolet light have produced frogs with leg deformities. Scientists speculate that holes in the ozone layer may allow enough ultraviolet light through to affect frogs in the wild.

Chemicals and pollution

Amphibian skin absorbs chemicals from both land and water. Tests show that some chemicals, pesticides, and industrial pollutants cause mutations, abnormal growth, or fatal deformities in frogs.

Industrial and agricultural by-products can harm local frogs. Acid rain and runoff rain can carry these chemicals to places far removed from human habitation.

Habitat loss and frog harvesting

Habitat loss is probably the biggest single factor in declining frog populations. Wetlands are frequently drained, filled in, or otherwise destroyed, depriving frogs of places to live. Commercial harvesting is another pressure. Worldwide, hundreds of thousands of frogs are captured each year and used in laboratories, schools, and restaurants; this causes serious declines in certain species.

Did you know?

We used four frogs in the original Digital Frog and none had deformities. This version required five frogs, and we discovered internal deformities in three of them.

We added one additional video that we recorded but were never able to use in a finished product: a time lapse showing the decomposition of a rabbit over eight days, reduced to one minute of video. This has become a surprising breakaway smash success on the Digital Frog YouTube Channel, closing in on 400,000 views and over 1200 comments.

We produced the video for a forest ecology program that was never completed as a way of demonstrating natural decomposition in a manner that words alone could not describe. It can be a bit disturbing for some, but quite dramatically shows how quickly the process happens, the various insects and organisms who help in decomposition, and goes a long way to explaining why you don’t often see the carcasses of dead animals in the woods‚ they don’t last long.

The version above is a new, higher resolution version than the original, allowing to you to see a bit more clearly what happens over the week the video was shot.

While our YouTube channel has been a bit quiet over the past while, we’re looking forward to putting up new videos both from our existing educational software and others that have not been publicly seen before. We’ll provide updates here, or you can also subscribe to the Digital Frog YouTube channel to see when new videos come online.

(If you’d like a downloadable version, we’re currently working on a new version of this video with narration to describe what is happening and the processes at work. That will be available exclusively through our Digital Frogger Club. You can sign up now and be notified when the video is ready for download.)

We could not help wondering why a practicing pathologist, who dissects human tissue for a living, would be taking the time to research dissection alternatives. This is what she says on the Dissection Alternatives website hosted by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine website:

“As a pathologist, I perform careful dissections every day‚ on human tissues, not on animals. It’s my job to know the relationship between anatomy and physiology, between health and disease.

But it wasn’t the frog or cat dissections we performed in public school that inspired me to study science. It was my excellent science teachers! The energy they poured into our classrooms, the academic heights they challenged us to reach, and their own bright intellects drew me into this field.

Decades later, I’ve come to regret those dissections and have since studied computerized alternatives that are extremely comprehensive. As a doctor who performs autopsies, I can assure students that computer images of well-preserved tissues look more like the “real thing” than the squishy gray organs of a formalin-fixed specimen. Simulated dissection is very realistic, the accompanying text is elegant, and the graphics are superb. Computerized alternatives are rapidly replacing animals in medical and veterinary colleges across the country. And the same is true at earlier levels of training. That means that younger students can easily learn biology by taking advantage of state-of-the-art methods that do not involve dissecting at all. My heartfelt gratitude goes out to science teachers everywhere who are creating a passion for humane scientific study. Tomorrow’s great physicians and researchers depend on it.”

We were not involved in the production of this video, but are thrilled with all that Nancy has to say about our program, The Digital Frog 2.5 and that she is one of our biggest supporters and proponents. And Nancy will not even allow us to buy her a cup of coffee!

We find it interesting that The Digital Frog 2.5 has also been voted the best dissection alternative by eSchool News readers. However, we created the program to teach anatomy and physiology, not dissection skills. We included the dissection module to bridge the gap between the traditional way of teaching anatomy and physiology and the 21st century way – better, kinder and much more cost effective way.

And one thing that Nancy does not mention is that schools can save huge amounts of money by teaching anatomy and physiology with The Digital Frog instead of with wet labs and textbooks. We have just returned from a science teachers conference in Texas. One middle school principal, who purchased a Building Site License for The Digital Frog 2.5 last year, stopped by our booth to say that he has already saved $1,200! You’ll be amazed at the cost savings, especially for large schools.