Stagg High School Science Club has 30-40 regular members who participate in a variety of science orientated activities and experiments. We also participate in the annual SWSC science competition. This year’s competition will be held at Bolingbrook High School on January 20th and members are already working hard, preparing for the event!
The science club recently visited the Field Museum and were provided a behind-the-scenes tour by members of the Fish Department as well as Mike Littmann, supported by Stacy Verble, who helped guide the tour. The Field Museum’s Division of Fishes now contains more than 1,750,000 specimens, 130,000 lots, 10,000 species, 4,500 tissue samples, 3,500 skeletons, 1,400 nominal types (6,550 specimens), and 450 families. On the tour, they learned about modern curation techniques, the importance of specimen localities, and the general importance of natural history collections and how they are similar to libraries as scientists from all over the globe visit the collections or borrow specimens from afar. The Science club was able to interact with collections staff during an informal Q & A session that covered questions as far reaching as the Field’s beetle colony used for preparing skeletal preparations to where staff currently travel on fishing expeditions in order to expand the collections for modern studies of classification and evolution. Club members learned about
and examined parasitic catfish, pirahna, paddlefish, sturgeon, invasive species as well as Kimodo dragons and sea turtles held in the collection.
