Ethogram Summary Assignment

Objective

You have been watching your animals closely for a much of the semester and been recording data on their behavior for at least 6 hours. This assignment is part of the larger, semester-long effort and it serves to describe the basic behavior of your animal. As such, it also serves as a starting point for you to ask questions, form hypotheses, and design an ethogram-based study that tests one or more of those hypotheses.


Everything you hand in with this assignment will be part of the final paper you turn in. You will receive a grade on this assignment. More importantly, you will get written comments on how you have approached your data collection.


Now that you have reached this point, you should begin to formulate hypotheses to test. That is your next assignment. Even though it is not due for another week, you can start as soon as you wish. Once you have your hypotheses formed, you should meet with me to discuss the best way to address them.

 

What you should submit

  1. Graphical and tabular (optional) summaries of the data you have collected thus far. I don’t expect that you will explore your data in every possible way, but you should give me some general summaries and any more detailed summary that you think important at this stage. Your figures should have captions that give appropriate information. See Biology 109 website for examples.
  2. Your catalog of behaviors – you turned this into me previously and I spoke with most of you about it. Include a copy (revised if appropriate) with the summary.
  3. Original field data - just submit examples of your original data from two observation periods (i.e., if you watched 9 animals for 15 minutes each, submit original data collection sheets from your observationis of animals #1 and #2). If you used Ethoscribe, just print the Excel spreadsheet from the two trials.
  4. One to two pages of text with the following
    1. Animal you are studying.
    2. Location of the study site(s)
    3. Number of animals at the study site
    4. Number of animals you observed
    5. Dates and times of your observations
    6. Environmental conditions (i.e., weather) when you observed
    7. General Comments on what patterns you have found with your data.
    8. Questions arising from your observations and your data summaries.

Grading Criteria Link