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Island Trees High School 10 th Grade Summer Reading Nonfiction Articles to Accompany They Cage the Animals at Night Directions: The following two articles center on two major topics of interest in They Cage the Animals at Night: homelessness and the working poor. Read them in preparation for a class discussion you will be expected to participate in when you return to school in September. Feel free to mark them up (underline, annotate) as you read so that you will be prepared to be an active participant. ARTICLE #1: AFTER HARDSHIP AND HOMELESSNESS, NATIONAL SCIENCE FAIR HONORS January 23, 2012 After Hardship and Homelessness, National Science Fair Honors By KENNETH CHANG Samantha Garvey, an 18-year-old senior at Brentwood High School on Long Island, flew cross-country last week to appear on Ellen DeGeneres’s daytime talk show. Her face was on the cover of Newsday, her hometown newspaper. Her congressman, Steve Israel, invited her to work in his office in Washington this summer. She has hired an agent to juggle interview requests. Ms. Garvey, a semifinalist in the Intel Science Talent Search, is exhilarated by the sudden celebrity, but said she would not mind when the attention passed and she could spend more time with her mussels. (Her work on them earned her the honor.) The Intel contest is the premier science competition for high school students, so all semifinalists earn time in the spotlight. But Ms. Garvey has received far more than the 299 others this year: She and her family are newly homeless, living in a Suffolk County shelter. “It’s not bad,” she said. “It’s a nice place.” Her parents were injured in a car accident last year. Her father, a cabdriver, was able to keep driving. Her mother, a nurse’s assistant, could not work for more than half a year.
The eldest of three children, Ms. Garvey tried to help with the family finances, applying for jobs at Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts. “Nobody called me back,” she said. The Garveys were evicted from their home on Dec. 31. Through the turmoil, Ms. Garvey continued working with her mussels, studying a dynamic that plays out in ecosystems around the world. The mussel species, Geukensiademissa, or ribbed mussel, is native to Long Island Sound. The Asian shore crab, Hemigrapsussanguineus, is not. It is a predatory interloper that arrived in the waters near Cape May, N.J., in 1988, and has since spread from Maine to North Carolina. The crabs like to eat mussels. The scientific question was whether the ribbed mussels would just sit there and be eaten by the new predator, or had nature provided them with a means of defending themselves? Ms. Garvey collected mussels from different parts of Flax Pond, a salt marsh on the North Shore of Long Island. She compared the shell length, width, weight and other measurements of those that lived where Asian shore crabs were prevalent with those that lived in areas with few crabs. She found that the mussels that lived in areas where the crabs were prevalent had thicker shells. Was that because the Asian shore crabs ate the mussels they could pry open most easily, leaving thicker-shelled survivors, or were the mussels able to grow greater protection in response to the predators? In a laboratory at Stony Brook University, Ms. Garvey put some young mussels in tanks with the crabs, although the crabs were in cages. In other tanks, mussels lived alone. After 65 days, she found that the mussels that shared their tank with the crabs had developed thicker shells than the ones that lived alone. The finding suggests that chemicals released by the Asian shore crabs in the water set off a defense mechanism in the mussels: they produce thicker shells that fend off predators. When the crabs are not around, the mussels do not pad their shells. During the school year, Ms. Garvey spent about a dozen hours a week on her mussel research, and much more during the summer. In all, she spent two and a half years on the
Page 1: Dear Incoming 10 th Grade Student,
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Page 7 and 8: Experience shows that public polici
Page 9 and 10: medical needs and to lower tax rate
Page 11 and 12: Code Name Verity - Elizabeth Wein W
Page 13 and 14: The Hour I First Believed - Wally L
Page 15 and 16: The Memory Keeper's Daughter - Kim
Page 17 and 18: ISLAND TREES HIGH SCHOOL CHOICE BOO
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Dear Incoming 10 Grade Student, We are excited to share this year's ...

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