Royal Society of New Zealand

Royal? No, I am not a princess or queen. The Royal Society organises my 6 months of Science learning and I wish to say "thank you".  I am learning so much - especially that scientists know a lot about a lot of things using words I did not know even existed.

Did you know that Captain James Cook was sent on a boat trip with other scientists to have a look at the planet Venus and that it was the Royal Society of London who sent them. James then also drew a map of New Zealand as he sat in his ship going all around the outside of NZ. They thought that NZ was stuck onto Australia - silly people! - but James proved them wrong.

So the Royal Society is still today committed to promoting science and we are very thankful. Look at how much we learn!

Captain Cook's ship: the Endeavour  

 

What is an entomologist?

Next week Tuesday I will be working all day in the Katikati area amongst the avocado trees with a entomologist. She has to collect samples of types of psyllids that like eating the leaves. These are jumping plant lice - nearly like head lice, but they don't suck human blood but the sap (blood) of plants. They are the size of aphids. 

If you are in the Future Force you may answer the question: what is an entomologist? Leave your name and answer in the "Comment" box. If you answer correctly, there is a surprise for you. :) 

Testing phloem uptake again

We are still testing how plants take up a new insecticide. This insecticide is made from natural ingredients.

Today we experimented with the leaf stems of capsicum plants.  We had to cut off the leaves under water and then place them in little containers called Eppendorf tubes. 

We leave them for 24 hours before we put them into bags and send them off to the South Island. There they have a special machine that can see if the leaves had sucked up any of the "poison". It costs $50 to test one leaf sample! So we have to do this correctly and precisely!

If you are a Curious Kiwi and you can answer how many containers of leaves you can count in the first photo, there is a surprise for you!

Brix??

Today I helped to measure the sugar content in kiwifruit still hanging on the vine. We do this once a week and we use the same fruit so that we record how the sugar content in the fruit increases over time.

We use a special machine like a torch and a computer in one and we test each fruit 15 times. Some very clever scientists have found out that we can use light that tries to go through a fruit and refracts (like in water - and kiwifruit is about 80% water!) to measure the Brix.  (Brix is a scale. So if my fruit shows a Brix count of 4 it is not ready to be picked and eaten. 13-17 is much better and my fruit will taste sweeter and yummier!)

Who can tell me what refraction is? If you are a student of Te Puke Primary School, a surprise is waiting for you! Just answer in a comment.

Phloem transport

Plants are made up of many things but phloem and xylem are the main parts. Xylem takes water and nutrients (minerals) up into the plant from the roots. Phloem carries energy (sugar) from the leaves to the rest of the plant.

Today I have helped set up an experiment to see whether a new insecticide (stuff that kills bugs that are not good for the plants) is sucked up by the phloem or not. We worked with capsicum plants. This is very fiddly and finicky work. But it has to be done right and with patience otherwise the experiment might not work.

Testing kiwifruit pollen

On my very first day I learned how to test kiwifruit pollen with Alexander Stain. This is a very toxic stain that scientist use to work with the pollen of plants. I had to wear gloves and a lab coat to do this. After the drops of stain and pollen dried, we put the glass slides under the microscope and counted the pollen on each slide. 

Then we recorded the data (all the pollen bits we counted) on a spreadsheet. Scientists do a lot of recording and data entry on computers. And then they have to look at what the data tells them and make decisions from that. 

I work with very friendly and helpful people here in Te Puke at the NZ Plant and Food Research Centre. They do so much research on kiwifruit so that orchardists can get better and more kiwifruit and so that people can have jobs like: pruning the kiwifruit, picking the fruit and packing the fruit to be sent everywhere so that every one can have a taste of our lovely kiwifruit.