Official Course Description: This course is designed to introduce the science of animal behavior and will focus on the methods and techniques that are used to study animal behavior. Lectures, discussions, and hands on activities will allow students to explore how animal behavior studies are designed, how behavior is measured in the laboratory and in the field, and how data are interpreted in light of the scientific method.
My Course Description: Currently, I am taking this course for my animal behavior major credit and I love it! Being that I want to major in Animal Behavior, I am finding that I am learning so much from this class as well as, discovering how much of it I already knew. One aspect about this class that I love is that I am able to make so many real life connections with the material I have learned. Intro to Animal Behavior has taught me so much and I can’t wait to gain further knowledge in future classes on this topic.
- For this project proposal the objective was to select an animal of interest and analyze different acoustical abilities found in that species. My partner and I decided to choose the Grey Wolf as our animal of interest and in our proposals we try to explain (if we were to go out into the wild and actually do acoustical research on this animal), how we would go about it and exactly what we’d be doing. For the Grey Wolf we decided to compare acoustical differences seen in Lone wolves versus Pack wolves, we compared the frequencies, power and duration of each howling session. I really enjoyed writing this project proposal, because even though research in animal vocalization is not something I’m extremely interested in, it was really neat to see how a researcher in this field of study might go about answering his/her own questions on topics like these as well as analyzing their captured data and coming up with conclusions for them.
