Behavioral Ecology, Evolution and Genomics
Cornell University, BIONB 3230, Fall 2021
Graduate Teaching Assistant
Course Description
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.
Student Outcomes
- Provide students with hands-on experience in designing experiments to test hypotheses about animal behavior that they have heard about in lecture courses.
- 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.
- 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.
- Provide students with detailed mentoring and feedback on the writing of scientific reports based on their own data and analyses.
- Expose students to the excitement and appeal of field and lab research on animal behavior.
Selected Topics
- Behavioral Scoring
- Demography
- Social Networks
- Phylogenetic Approaches
- RNA Sequencing Approaches
- Population Genomics