Biology 280: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

 Hope College
Fall Semester 2011

Welcome to Biology 280, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology!  As you're probably already aware, Biology 280 is part of a three-course introductory sequence in biology, each course of which focuses largely on a different level of biological organization. Thus Biology 240, Cells and Genetics, deals primarily with biological phenomena that take place at the cellular or molecular levels of organization. Biology 260, Organismal Biology, deals with phenomena that take place at the level of individual organisms - largely physiology and anatomy. Biology 280 focuses on those phenomena that involve higher levels of organization, from populations to ecosystems. Our objectives for the course are to enable you to:

•  develop an appreciation for biological processes that operate at higher levels of organization - within populations, communities, and whole ecosystems.

• understand the intimate relationship between ecological and evolutionary processes.
  hone your skills as a scientist, including experimental design, hypothesis testing, and field/laboratory techniques.

•  develop your ability to identify some of the more common organisms in the West Michigan area, and to understand how they interact with the physical and biological components of their environment.

•  understand the scientific bases of important environmental, agricultural, and public health problems that have ecological or evolutionary bases.

•  have a few laughs while you're at it.

How Biology 280 fits into the Broader Educational Objectives of Hope College

Although Biology 280 is required for all Biology majors and minors, and indeed is a prerequisite for any upper-level course in biology, it also emphasizes many of the same skills, habits, and ways of knowing common to our General Education program and indeed to a broadly defined liberal arts education as detailed at the college's General Education Website.  We encourage you to visit that website, browse especially the sections on skills and habits of learning, foundational knowledge, and take the "academic tour" of the liberal arts.  Doing so will not only illuminate what we hope to accomplish in Biology 280 - it will remind you why you chose to come to a place like Hope in the first place!

Course Website and Moodle Pages

Biology 280 also has a website: (http://www.hope.edu/academic/biology/classdata/bio280/280home.htm). On it you'll find electronic versions of some of the handouts for the course, like this syllabus.  You'll also find the datasets from lab exercises in a form that you can download into statistics or spreadsheet programs.  Although we'll use the website for most things, sometimes we'll probably use moodle for you to turn something in.  So make sure that your moodle settings will automatically send you an email if and when we post something on moodle.

How to get an A in this course

The instructors will be overjoyed if we can give everyone an A in this class. That doesn't mean that the course will be a pushover, however; ecology and evolutionary biology are both very broad fields, incorporating knowledge from most other areas of biology (and even chemistry, physics, geology, and just about anything else you can think of) to explain how the natural world works and why it works the way it does. The major responsibility for how much you learn and how well you do in Biology 280 is entirely yours, of course, so to ensure that you get the best possible grade, pay particular attention to the following:

• Come to class every day. Some material will only be available in class. Obviously, everything said by your instructor is fair game on exams, and in many cases it won't be covered in the textbook or lab manual. We'll also make assignments and important announcements, and from time to time even have activities that will count as part of your grade. If you're not there, you lose.  By the way, the correlation coefficient between attendance and total course points last year was 0.702, which was highly significant statistically (p << 0.01) - it pays to go to class.

• Be on time. Coming in late disrupts the class, and it's rude to both the instructor and the other students. If you do get there late, please come in through the back door, and wait until the end of the period to get any handouts, etc.

• Stay until the end of the class period. The instructors will make every effort to end on time, but you should plan on the class continuing right up to the end of the scheduled time. Packing up your materials before the end of class is disruptive, and might cause you or the students around you to miss an important point or assignment. In the interest of protecting everyone's right to hear everything that the instructor says, students who deliberately pack up noisily in order to end the period will be asked not to attend the next class meeting.

• Check your email every day. Sometimes we'll change or clarify assignments, points made during class, etc. before the next class meeting via email, and you are responsible for getting these announcements just as if they were made during class. These announcements will be made via your Hope College email account, so make sure that you check it! If for some reason you don't have an account, get one from CIT right away.

• Do all of the reading assignments. Everything in the reading assignments is also fair game on exams.

• Participate actively in the lectures and discussions. Think critically about the lecture material, and how it fits (or doesn't!) with what you know from other courses, personal experiences, etc., and bring up your questions and comments about it during the lecture. We guarantee that if you're unclear about something that the instructor said, others are too, even if they're afraid to say so. So do us all a favor and ask the question! If the instructor asks you a question during class, answer it to the best of your ability. If you really don't know the answer, say so. Above all, don't be afraid to be wrong - making mistakes is how we learn!

• Turn in all of the assignments on time. In general, there will be a 10% per day late penalty on assignments, including weekends, breaks, and holidays.

• Come to the Friday afternoon discussions.  Although we don't intend to present new material there, we discuss material from both lecture and lab and you're responsible for what's covered there.  Lots of other students will probably have questions about the same things you do, so coming to hear their questions discussed will help you too.  You might not even know that you don't understand something fully until you hear someone else ask the question!  We can also tell you this - attendance at the discussions pays off.  Last year the correlation between attendance and total course points at the end of the semester was 0.426, which was highly statistically significant (p < 0.01).  In other words, people who attended the Friday discussions more frequently got higher grades.

• Most importantly, see your instructor if you have any problems in the course. The instructors will have office hours every week so you can meet with them about questions or problems with either the lecture or lab portions of the course. If the office hours don't work for you, we'll make appointments at other hours. Or you can call us on the telephone or email us.

Resources You Will Need

Three different printed sources are required for the course:

 ·        Brooker, R.J., E.P. Widmaier, L.E. Graham, and P.D. Stiling.  2010.  Biology, 2nd edition.  McGraw-Hill Higher Education, Boston.  - You probably already have the book if you've had Biology 240 and/or Biology 260.

 ·        Weiner, J. 1994. The Beak of the Finch. Vintage Books, New York. - A major theme for this course is the intimate connection between ecology and evolution, and this great little book about Darwin's Finches - written for a general audience - illustrates that connection in a really entertaining way. You'll read the whole book over the course of the semester, but a particular portion of it will be assigned for each of the exams.

 ·        Laboratory Manual - For the lab portion of the course, you'll need to purchase a voucher for a lab packet from the bookstore. Give the voucher to Lori Hertel (Director of Laboratories) or Gloria Taylor (Dept. Secretary) and they'll give you a notebook with the lab materials. We'll add things to it over the course of the semester, so don't worry if it's not very full at first!

 ·        Lab/Field Notebook.  The kind with a black and white patterned cover and  graph paper pages.  The bookstore should have them.

A special note to alumni of Biology 240 and 260:

In most ways the the format for biology 280 is very similar to that for the other biology "core" courses.  There are some differences between Biology 280 and some of the other courses, however:

• First, Biology 280 has a weekly discussion period (Friday 2-3 pm), as noted above.  Although we can use the time for anything people need help with, we usually spend much of the time talking about how to do the data analyses for labs.  Since we'll be dealing with large data sets for most of the labs in this course, learning how to manipulate them efficiently will save you lots of time.  In fact, many students have said in the past that without attending the weekly help sessions they could never have done the analyses correctly without spending much more time than they had available.  Since it's a course for which you registered, you cannot have a schedule conflict that would prevent you from being there. So please be there.

• Second, we'll use data collected by the entire class for most of the labs.  Doing so will allow us to make much more robust tests of hypotheses, but it also means that each group will have to turn their data in to the instructor very quickly after they collect it.  Part of the grade on each of the lab reports will depend upon the quality of the data you collect and upon your timeliness in turning it in. 

• You'll keep a detailed field/lab notebook throughout the semester with site information, hypotheses to be tested, experimental design, data, and data analyses.  We'll collect your notebook at least twice during the semester and check it for completeness and accuracy.  See the lab manual for details.

• For some labs it will take longer than a week to compile and analyze the data.  If so, you're responsible for having your lab notebook up to date only on that part of the lab we've actually completed, of course.

• Fourth, we're going to evaluate your understanding of most of the labs with lab exams, on which you'll have to a) understand any background material assigned for the labs, b) be able to collect data (including recognizing any organisms used, operating instruments, etc.), as we did in lab, c) analyze and interpret sample data sets similar (or even identical) to those we collected in lab, and d) be able to summarize the labs by writing sections of a lab report (introduction, materials and methods, results, or discussion).  There will be only one formal lab report during the semester, so most of our evaluation of your work in lab will be via the lab exams and field/lab notebook.

•  The usual scenario will work like this for a typical lab:

  • Your group will turn in the data to your instructor no later than 24 hours after your lab, usually in electronic form (e.g., an Excel or PASW file).

  • Your instructor will compile the data for the whole lab section or all sections (if needed) within a day or two and make it available to you in a form of his or her choosing (usually a data file linked to the course web page).

  • You'll then have about a week to analyze and interpret the data.
    

 About statistics and graphics software…

The "official" statistics and graphics software for Biology 280 is PASW for Windows.  You'll be using it a lot, so it will be worth your time to learn how to use it well for the kinds of analyses we'll do.  You WILL have to use PASW to analyze data sets during the lab exams, so if you haven't learned how to use it beforehand, you'll have no chance for a good grade on the exams (hence, in the course).  We'll also use EXCEL for a couple of labs, where a spreadsheet is better suited to the data entry/handling task than a statistics package.

 About evaluation and grading…

The lecture and laboratory portions of Biology 280 are each worth 50% of the total grade, so you should expect to work hard in both.

 Hour exams (lecture)

There will be three hour exams, each worth 100 points. Hour exams will include machine-graded multiple choice and matching questions as well as some human-graded essay questions. Be aware that questions will be drawn from the lecture and both Brooker et al.'s and Weiner's books. Questions on Weiner's book will be primarily on broad patterns rather than details. You should also note that a significant number of questions on exams will require more than mere regurgitation of material from lectures and readings. In fact, some of the questions will be about organisms or situations you've never even heard of or read about! To answer such questions, you'll have to apply the concepts you've learned in lecture or through the readings. The reason for this approach is that science is really more about ideas than it is about "facts," and you need to get used to thinking synthetically.  If you've ever had to learn about Bloom's "taxonomy of educational objectives," this will sound familiar (see http://www.kurwongbss.eq.edu.au/thinking/Bloom/blooms.htm, for example).  Recalling information as it was presented and applying concepts to the same cases that were used to illustrate them is at a very elementary level.  The most important objectives of "higher" education are to enable students to apply concepts to new situations, to understand the relationships between different concepts, and to be able to synthesize entirely new solutions or ideas out of a deep understanding of many different concepts and facts.  Your upper-level courses will routinely challenge you to demonstrate this deeper understanding and higher-level reasoning, so get used to it!   More about this as the first exam approaches. 

Exams must be taken on the day scheduled.  Except for rather rare excused absences (those in which the instructor is notified by the Dean of Students: e.g. serious illness, death in the family), no make up exams will be given. To determine if your absence from an exam is an excused absence, you have to ask your instructor before the exam is given. Make up exams for excused absences may be essay or oral exams.

Do not come to an exam late and expect to be given the full hour to take the exam.  I try to write exams that can be completed in 50 minutes, but I will often give you the option of starting at 10:30.  Regardless of when you start, the exam ends at the end of the scheduled class period.

 Final Exam (lecture)

The final exam will be of similar format to the hour exams, and it will include material from earlier in the course as well as material covered since hour exam 3.  It is therefore CUMULATIVE, and it's worth 125 points.  About one-quarter to one-third of the points will deal with material from earlier in the course, and many of the questions for this part will be deliberately chosen to test you again on some of the “most missed and most misunderstood” questions from the 3 previous exams.  You will be notified one week before the final (if not before) which questions those were.

 Lecture Assignments

Several times during the semester I'll give an assignment or quiz during lecture to be completed during lecture or perhaps turned in on the next lecture day.  It might even be in the form of a quiz to test your knowledge of some area of the course on which the class as a whole did poorly on the previous exam, and that I asked you to review beforehand.  These assignments will sum to 20 points for the whole semester.  

 "Cards" (lecture)

Seven times during the semester, you will be asked to hand in a card on which an assignment has been done during lecture. Sometimes it will be just an attendance card on which you simply fill in your name. Other times you'll have to answer some question on the basis of that day's lecture. Each card will be worth 5 points. The days that cards will be used for activities will not be announced ahead of time, and if you miss a card day, you cannot make up the activity.

 Seminars (lecture)

The Biology Department conducts a weekly seminar series. You must attend 2 seminars during the semester, and they will be valued at 10 points each. When you attend a seminar, personally obtain a card from the instructor, write an account on the back of what you learned at the seminar, and hand it in at the end of the seminar. If schedule conflicts prevent you from attending two seminars, you can hand in a journal article report for each seminar missed. Each journal article report must include 1) your name, 2) title of the article, 3) names of all authors, 4) journal title, 5) volume, pages and year, 6) a one page, typewritten summary of the article including the purpose of the study, methods used, results and significance of the study. The summary must be in your own words showing you have read and understood the article (at least partially) 7) a photocopy of the first page of the article which you choose. At the end of this syllabus is a list of the journals from which you can read articles and complete reports.

 Lab Exams

Twice during the semester you will take an exam in lab, probably during your regularly scheduled lab time.  Part of the exam will focus on the things you DO in lab, such as being able to identify particular organisms and operate instruments that we've used. Other questions will require you to analyze and interpret data of the sort that we collected for the lab exercises. Still others will test your understanding of the background for the labs, your understanding of the results that we actually got for the labs we did, and even your ability to write parts of a lab report.  As noted above, you'll only be writing one lab report in Biology 280, so most of our evaluation of your performance in the laboratory part of the course will rely on these exams.  And for that reason, they'll be worth 150 points each!  Furthermore, since each student will have to analyze and interpret similar data on lab exams, it's imperative that each of you learns how to do so without the help of your group members.  It's still a good idea to do the data analyses together, so that you can teach one another.  But each of you has to learn to do it on your own!

 Formal Lab Reports

Every student will prepare an individual lab report based on one of four labs performed during the semester.  You'll sign up for which lab to write up early in the semester. These reports will have most of the usual sections (introduction, materials and methods, results, discussion, and literature cited), but they'll be written in a more concise form than a formal lab report or a manuscript for publication.  Short-format reports will have no more than 4 double-spaced pages of text (though they can have as many tables, figures, and literature citations as necessary), and in fact your instructor will stop reading after 4 pages!  Our goal is for you to learn how to write clearly and concisely, while covering all of the most important points in describing a scientific study - in other words, maximum information density.  This is a hallmark of good scientific writing (probably any writing), and we hope that getting more practice at it will help you to write better reports in your subsequent courses as well.  The short-format reports will be worth 100 points, and you'll have a chance to revise yours in response to the instructor's feedback on the first submission.  See the detailed handout on short-format lab reports in your lab manual.  Although the primary sources of instructions and help for this assignment are the aforementioned handout and your lab instructor, be aware that the Center for Writing and Research on campus (main floor of VanWylen Library, next to the reference desk) is a good source of assistance for writing in general.  If you need some feedback on how to organize your ideas into a coherent written form, drop by during their regular hours to talk to one of the Writing Assistants or make an appointment (http://hope.edu/lib/cwr/appointment.php).

Data Sheets

As noted above, analyses for most of the labs will use data collected by the entire class, and for this reason it's very important that we collect and report data carefully and ON TIME. As an incentive to work carefully and on time, a portion of your lab grade (40 course points) will depend upon the quality of your data and it's timely submission.

Lab Notebook checks

You'll keep a field/lab notebook for the laboratory portion of Biology 280, and for it you should get the kind with the black and white patterned cover and graph paper pages.  We'll evaluate the quality of your field and lab notes by collecting your lab notebook at least twice during the semester to make sure that you've included all of the information required and that you're up to date on the data analyses and interpretations.  These checks will be worth a total of 60 course points.  See the handout in the lab manual for details of what information needs to be in each day's entry.

Summary of grading in Biology 280

3 hour exams @ 100                        = 300 pts
1 final exam @ 125                          = 125 pts
2 - 4 lecture assignments                  = 20 pts
7 cards @ 5                                     = 35 pts
2 seminars @ 10                              = 20 pts
2 lab exams @ 150                          = 300 pts
1 short-format formal lab report        = 100 pts
Data sheets                                       = 40 pts   
Lab notebook checks                       = 60 pts

Total Possible                                   = 1000 points

We often do grade on a curve in Biology 280, but only when the curve works in your favor.  That is, if you get 90%, 80%, 70%, etc. of total course points, you'll get at least some sort of A, B, or C grade, respectively, regardless of how many other people get that grade.  But if in the instructor's opinions more people should get higher grades than they would by this straight scale, we reserve the right to assign A's for less than 90% of total course points, B's for less than 80%, and so on.  To get an F in this course, you'll have to get less than 60% and demonstrate that you're not really taking the course very seriously.  This does happen from time to time, however.

Students with Disabilities

Any student whose disability falls within ADA (Americans With Disabilities Act) guidelines should inform the instructor at the beginning of the semester of any special accommodations or equipment needs necessary to complete the requirements for this course.  Students should register their disability with Jeanne Lindell, Coordinator of Academic Support Services for Students with Disabilities, in the Academic Support Center located in VanZoeren Hall 261.  If you have questions, call Student Development at extension 7800. 

Course Assessment

Hope College expects all students to assess each course in an effort to continuously improve student learning.  At the end of the semester, you will be asked to assess how well this course met its stated goals.  Your responses will be kept anonymous, but I will take the collective results seriously in thinking about how to provide Hope students the best possible education.  Your responses matter.  You are urged to participate in this important process.

Academic Integrity

We assume that all students enrolled in Biology 280 will exhibit the highest levels of academic integrity. Refer to the Hope College Student Handbook for the College policy on academic integrity. Our policy is that each student take credit for work that is entirely his or her own unless we have authorized a group project. We never authorize group work on an exam nor the use of any types of notes during an exam, and you should refresh your memory about the college's plagiarism policy at www.hope.edu/lib/plagiarism.  Students who violate the academic integrity policies of the college or the instructors will be given a grade of F for the course and be referred to the appropriate college officials.

 Further academic resources

Hope College maintains an Academic Support Center for all students. If you have a little trouble organizing a study plan; if you aren't sure how to approach certain kinds of exams; or if you need more significant academic help, the ASC may just be the place for you. They can even arrange tutors to help in some cases, although there are a lot of other options they and we will want to explore first. Don't see the ASC as some kind of remedial clinic for academically poor students. There are few students at Hope College truly in that category. Fix your small learning problems while they're fixable. The ASC can help you think through how to do that. Ask us how to contact the ASC, or go directly to their offices on the second floor of Van Zoeren Hall.

 Daily Schedule

The tentative lecture schedule for the course is available via a link on the course homepage. The schedule includes the subject that will be dealt with on each day and pages from Brooker et al.'s book that you should have read by the time class happens. The lab schedule is also there, as are other important events like exams.

Journals From Which Articles Can Be Used for the Library Assignment to Make Up a Missed Seminar

American Journal of Botany
The American Naturalist
American Zoologist
Animal Behavior
The Auk
Behaviour
Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology
The Biological Bulletin
Botanical Gazette
Bulletin of the Entomological Society of America
Canadian Journal of Botany
Condor
Copeia
Ecology
Ecological Monographs
Evolution
Herpetologica
International Journal of Parasitology
The Journal of Arachnology
Journal of Ecology
Journal of Animal Ecology
Journal of the Arnold Arboretum
The Journal of Parasitology
Journal of Phycology
The Journal of Protozoology
Nature
Oecologia
Oikos
Parasitology
Plant Physiology
Psyche
Science
The Wilson Bulletin