BIONB 3230 - [Methods in Animal Behavior]

(PBS-AS)

Spring. Next offered 2018-2019 (offered alternate years). 4 credits. Letter grades only.

Prerequisite: BIONB 2210. Enrollment limited to: 24 students.

M. Sheehan.

This course provides hands-on experience with modern methods for studying animal behavior both in the field and in the laboratory. Class projects will be complemented with a series of workshops and demonstrations of methods. Topics include experimental design, animal tracking, animal color analysis, sound analysis, chemical analysis, capture/marking methods, determining relatedness, measuring social behavior, and behavioral statistics in R.

Outcome 1: Provide students with hands-on experience in designing experiments to test hypotheses about animal behavior that they have heard about in lecture courses.

Outcome 2: Provide students with hands-on experience designing field and lab studies with the eventual statistics in mind and then using those statistics on data they themselves have gathered.

Outcome 3: Expose students to a diversity of devices and techniques for animal behavior research including tracking, color measurement, sound recording and analysis, video recording and analysis, and olfactory signal analysis.

Outcome 4: Provide students with detailed mentoring and feedback on the writing of scientific reports based on their own data and analyses.

Outcome 5: Expose students to the excitement and appeal of field and lab research on animal behavior.