To close out the school year, 8th graders in Middle School Science Teacher Darren Brown's class researched how global climate change affects intertidal organisms with a hands-on lab involving snails and hermit crabs!

"This lab gives students the opportunity to conduct a hypothesis-based, hands-on experiment focusing on a current environmental change, created by the anthropogenic burning of fossil fuels, and the impacts on an important local ecosystem," he explained.

Through a collaboration with California State University, Northridge, Brown collected the snails and crabs and set them up in tanks of differing temperature in his classroom. From there, students created mini ecosystems using mason jars to better understand how climate change may affect the marine organisms. They measured how concentrations of dissolved oxygen and pH change as seawater temperature increases, and determined that increased temperature can stress organisms differently, which could result in a breakdown of their ecosystem.