Abstract

Students investigate the role that animal senses, primarily vision, play in survival as they try to understand a realistic fictional problem with a real organism. They investigate why there is a decline in the number of Tokay geckos living in one area of a rain forest in the Philippines. Humans change the environments in which we live in many ways—clearing forests to make roads and build houses, removing species of plants and animals that are dangerous to humans, installing lights to make it easier to see at night, and so on. Often these changes affect other species’ survival in unanticipated ways.