Shark Buoyancy – Animal Science Experiment

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We love hands on learning here, science experiments are a favorite way to learn and spend our time together in our family and homeschool. This science is easy to do, and perfect for shark week in July.

Floating Shark Science Experiment

What you need:

a large bowl filled with water

balloons

dish detergent

water

vegetable oil

marker (optional)

What you do:

Add about 1/4 cup of dish detergent, oil, and water to each of your balloons. Try to get any air out of your balloon before tying the knot or it will affect your experiment.

Fill a large bowl with water.

Draw a face on your balloons – optional.

Place your balloons into the bowl of water and watch what happens.

What you see happening:

What happens when you place the balloons in the water? Does one float? Does one sink? Is there one that is just kinda floating there in the middle?

There is one balloon that is going to float and this is the answer to how sharks can float and why this shark buoyancy animal science experiment can be a success. Tip: make sure to get all the air out of the balloons or it will throw this experiment off.

What Helps Sharks Float

Sharks rely on their liver which has oil and fats. Their liver has two parts filled with oil and fats, substances that are lighter than water helping them to float. Liver is as much as 30% of the shark weight, and although it helps for buoyancy, sharks must swim continuously to avoid sinking.

Shark Buoyancy - Science experiment

Prep Time: 5 minutes

Active Time: 5 minutes

Total Time: 10 minutes

Difficulty: Easy

Estimated Cost: $1

Let's learn more about how shark float.

Materials

balloons
vegetable oils
dish detergent
water

Tools

A large bowl of water.

Instructions

Add about 1/4 cup of dish detergent, oil, and water to each of your balloons. Try to get any air out of your balloon before tying the knot or it will affect your experiment.
Fill a large bowl with water.
Draw a face on your balloons - optional.
Place your balloons into the bowl of water and watch what happens.

Notes

Check out Arctic animal science experiments for more animal science fun.

More Learning about Sharks:

Animal Science Activity

We’ll be doing more animal related science projects around here as I have three kids who love hands on learning and science experiments. My oldest, she is an animal lover and wants to learn everything she can. Make sure you check out our arctic animal experiment, and learn how animals stay warm in freezing cold temperatures of the arctic and similar place.

Arctic Animals – Science Experiment

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What child isn’t wondering how arctic animals stay warm considering we make our kids wear layers of clothing in the winter and the animals just have fur.

We learned how they live in the cold, how they survive the freezing cold temperatures. Considering my oldest likes to sit down and watch animal documentaries, she loves what we are learning right now.

Click here to save this to Pinterest for later!

Right now in our BookShark Science curriculum we are learning animals from the Usborne World of Animals book.

My kids know what cold is, we don’t shy away from going out in the cold Saskatchewan winters. But arctic cold is something completely different.

This is a great arctic animals for kids activity to demonstrate how penguins, polar bears, and other arctic animals stay warm with their layers of fat we grabbed a package of Crisco (vegetable shortening) from the store and did up a bowl of icy cold water.

What you need:

ice cubes
cold water
shortening
baggies
latex gloves – optional

What we did to learn how animals stay warm in icy water:

We put a large bowl of water into the freezer to let it get extra cold, and then added the ice cubes.

We put a bare hand into the icy water first, just to get an idea of how cold the water really was.

The original plan was to wear latex gloves, but I couldn’t find them locally, so we simply stuck our hand inside a Ziploc sandwich bag. A bar of shortening wrapped about the hand, and then another sandwich bag on covering the shortening, to keep it from falling off in the bowl.

It looks crazy, but worked out great. And best of all for this Momma, clean up was basically non-existent because we just had to slip our hand out of the baggie and toss the whole thing in the garbage.