More Than Lip Service: Coaching as a Christian

When we help our athletes learn integrity, self-discipline, dependability, humility, and service, we help them develop character. Posting about growing athletes from In All Things - an online journal for critical reflection on faith, culture, art, and every ordinary-yet-graced square inch of God’s creation. https://inallthings.org/more-than-lip-service-coaching-as-a-christian

Challenging the Curious Mind

Is the education you are providing for your students real? Is it effective? Is it challenging the curious mind? There is a great concern today about what is happening in our schools and about how the youth of today will face the future of tomorrow

Food, Fear and Defence - Behavioral and morphological adaptation of juvenile perch under the risk of predation

Predation is one of the major structuring forces in animal communities, because most predators hunt selectively. This favors characteristics in prey that facilitate the avoidance of predation. Correspondingly, various and often plastic morphological and behavioral defense strategies have been found throughout numerous taxa. However, the expression of defense traits often confronts prey with time and/or resource allocation trade-offs. Thus behavioral defenses, like watching out for potential threats, inactivity and hiding largely are incompatible with foraging and the energy expenditure to build up morphological defenses cannot be allocated into e.g. growth, storage or reproduction. Therefore, additional effects, like an individual’s nutritional status, resource use, size and/or age balance, often influenced of these trade-offs. Furthermore, theoretical results indicate that the plasticity of a trait is per se determined by the adaptiveness of a given phenotype, its associated costs and the variability of the selective environmental agent. This illustrates the complexity of patterns shaping animal behavioral and morphological defense expression under predation risk. Eurasian perch (Perca fluviatilis L.) is a common freshwater species throughout Europe, where juvenile perch display consistent variation in morphology and behavior and both traits are sensitive to the environment and especially to predation risk. Therefore perch is an optimal model organism to study the complex defense trait dynamics in predator-prey interactions. In the first study, a common garden setup was used to examine the genetic and environmental components of the morphological variation from two lake populations with differences in size-specific predation risk. We found differences in head and jaw length and slight differences in body depth between the wild young-of-the-year perch from Lake Ängersjön and Lake Fisksjön. The differences found between the wild fish from the two lakes were, however, not maintained under common garden rearing. The observed morphological divergence between the wild juvenile perch from Lake Ängersjön and Lake Fisksjön seems to stem mainly from a plastic response to different conditions in the two lakes. Morphological traits are not influenced by direct reaction to the size-specific risk of cannibalism, but probably stem from a combination of different environmental characteristics, including resource and habitat use, and the density of other piscivores such as pike. In the second chapter young-of-the-year perch were reared on either fish larvae or zooplankton to investigate whether the use of divergent resources changes the reaction to a novel surrounding and the behavior under the threat of predation. Both phenotypes reacted differently under predation risk and inspected the predator more frequently when their familiar prey was presented during the trials, indicating that resource polymorphism may influence risk-taking behavior in juvenile fish. The third study used juvenile 0+ and 1+ perch in an experimental approach to vary the factor of predation risk. Predators were able to feed on perch during a mesocosm period. Perceived predation risk affected the behavior and the morphology of both age classes of perch. Boldness decreased with the intensity of predation, while morphology of perch changed towards deeper bodied individuals. Although it remains unanswered if these changes are a result of selective predation or phenotypic response of the prey, the latter explanation is assumed to be conclusive because there was no correlation between the observed changes in the length-frequency distributions and the predation risk of perch. In the final study, we measured behavioral and morphological traits in 0+ perch and compared their selective values in response to the two most common predators, adult perch and pike. Selection on behavioral traits was higher than on morphological traits and perch predators preyed overall more selectively than pike. Pike tended to positively choose shallow bodied and non-vigilant individuals. In contrast, perch predators selected mainly for bolder juvenile perch. These results indicate that shyness and increased body depth might be adaptive for juvenile perch under predation risk. However, the relative specific predation intensity for the divergent traits differed between the predators, providing some additional ideas why juvenile perch display such a high degree of phenotypic plasticity

Viewing and Visual Representation in the Physical Education Classroom

Visual representation and viewing are integral parts of language arts, communication, and physical education. Time constraints often limit a self-contained classroom teacher, or even the language arts teacher\u27s ability to adequately address all areas of language arts. Therefore, it is important to include language arts in other content areas. Visual representation and viewing can be effectively integrated into physical education, and can enhance the physical education learning experience as a result. In this article, the author discusses several strategies to integrate viewing and visual representation in a physical education classroom