4 Degrees of Death for African Penguins

Scott, Mike. African Penguin Laying on an Egg, (2008)

In my STEAM class "Population", we learned about the evolution of organisms on Earth. We got to go to the Field Museum to study our animal up close. We learned different math concepts, such as a Box and Whisker Plot, standard deviation, standard deviation, permutation, and combination.

Our challenge was to take an element of our animal's life and change it. My animal is the African penguin, which lives in the Southern tip of Africa, along the coast of the Southern ocean. Their climate is humid and sunny. In my scenario, African penguins still live in South Africa, but the temperature raises by 4 degrees. 4 degrees average may seem like a little bit, but it places a lot of weight on the penguin life. If you think that 4 degrees is a little bit, think again. The average temperature during the Ice Age rose by 4 degrees. That new temperature is the temperature that we live in today! Snowy ice caps everywhere disappeared. Hot weather for the penguins got even hotter, so they are placed in a bad spot.

The African Penguin would suffer from 3 risks in the hotter weather; heat waves, rain storms that lead to high sea levels, and eggs not properly warmed up. The opportunities are that they don't have to grow as many feathers to keep warm, so they can get around faster with a slimmer body. I looked at 9 penguins, and took a sample set of how fast they swim.

I figured out the minimum, maximum, range, mean, median, mode, first quartile, third quartile, and the range of those quartiles. I made a box and whisker plot to depict how the data is distributed. The plot is pretty much in a good range.

JMP, Data, (2017)

I took the data and subtracted the arithmetic mean from them. I took that mean and square it, and added all the numbers together. Then I divided it by the number of data minus 1, to get a sample number. I took the total (18.99) and i found the square root of it, which is 4.35. That is my standard deviation, which is a quantity calculated to indicate the extent of deviation for a group as a whole.

We learned about how to figure out the different ways you can choose a number of objects out of a group. When order matters, it is called permutation. When order doesn't matter, it's called combination. 

Since there are 9 different penguins, and I'm choosing 3, my combination will look like 9C3.

Permutation will not work for this situation.

JMP, Order, (2017)

This is a combination because I chose the penguins at random.