Florida Citizens for Science

Ladies and gentlemen, we have packed our bags and moved to new digs over at www.flascience.org. We have a general website and a new blog over there now open for business.

Please change all general links you may have for Florida Citizens for Science to the new location.

This old blog will probably hang out here for a while, so any links to specific posts will probably be fine. But any new links need to go over to the new site.

Thanks! See ya there.

Uneducated kids imperil state growth, report says

A generation of poorly educated children unlikely to get college degrees threatens Florida’s ability to create a competitive work force and may weaken the state’s economy, a new report being released today says.

Many Florida students are not academically prepared for college, most will not attend and many who do will struggle to pay, says the nonpartisan National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education in Washington.

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Florida also is cited as one of only two states where the proportion of high-school students taking upper-level science courses has declined in the past 12 years, the study found. Black students in ninth and 12th grades are only three-quarters as likely as whites to take upper-level math and science courses, the report says.

Scientists dig bugs to help lakes’ health

TAVARES — Like a fortune-teller poring over leaves in a tea cup, Sandi Hanlon-Breuer studies the worms and insect larvae living in the bottom of lakes to see the future.

The Lake County Water Authority biologist has a giant collection of creepy-crawlers she has culled from the bottom of two of Central Florida’s biggest lake systems, the Clermont and Harris chains, during the past year.

They tell her what has been going on in the lakes and offer clues about whether they should continue to stay healthy. It’s all part of a biological checkup of the two chains — the latest weapon the environmental scientists can use to protect water quality.

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If the lake is healthy and has good water quality, the samples will have relatively few bugs to pick through. But the healthy lakes usually have a wide diversity of species — often including larvae of mayflies, caddisflies and dragonflies in addition to snails, crayfish, leeches and other species.

Lakes with poor water quality tend to be home mostly to aquatic worms and midge larvae and have little diversity.

It’s not a job for the squeamish.

Most of the bugs are dead by the time she gets around to studying them, but a few are still moving.

“You get some that are still crawling around, and that’s a problem,” said Hanlon-Breuer, who has a master’s degree in lake science. “This isn’t anything I learned in college.”