Identificação e biologia de serpentes aplicadas ao ensino médio : elaboração de protocolo ilustrado de aulas práticas com base na diversidade da região de Barra do Garças - Mato Grosso, e nas espécies do Parque Estadual da Serra Azul

Abstract

The practical approach of Biological issues applied to high school students represents an important effort to improve the understanding of general descriptive concepts offered in a preliminary expositive fashion. In Zoology, the contents associated with snakes‘ biology and classification has important roots in problems of public health, empowering students with fundamental tools on the social and conservation backgrounds. This work assessed aimed to produce a protocol and practical tools to teaching activities involving the biology and classification of snakes, providing the students technical capacities in the field in order to multiply the acquired knowledge beyond the school borders. In the Midwest Brazil, an area with large-scale activities and agriculture and cattle ranching and high incidence of snakebite accidents, educational efforts on the subject represent fruitful initiatives with positive social and conservational effects. I conducted this project in the in a school of the municipality of Barra do Garças, Mato Grosso state, working on the development of a teaching method involving expositive classes and practical activities that will recur to preserved specimens and an identification protocol for the most common and medical relevant snake species occurring in the region. As a first checklist of snake species in the area, we count on previous inventories in the Serra Azul State Park – PESA – that forms the basis for the most probable species to present in the region. The activities took place during the year of 2018 with nearly 25 students of the 2º year of the High School Antonio Cristino Cortes, in Barra do Garças, Mato Grosso, in partnership with the Natural History Museum of Araguaia (MUHNA), of the Federal University of Mato Grosso, as well as with the Herpetological Collection of the same institution. The results of the protocol application demonstrate that high school students are perfectly able to learn how to identify poisonous and non-poisonous entities, and are also open to associate these animals strictly to biological parameters free from any naive folkloric aspect linked to the harmful figure of the snakes. Finally, I encourage the application of practical methods that are seldom used at high school level (more often at universities) such as practical protocols as knowledge sources to instruct children and teenagers, who become able to spread the acquired concepts through other people promoting, not only public health policies, but also the conservation of biodiversity.