jmalloldiaz's blog

Looking back at start of the semester I didn't know how Writing in Biology would be like, but now that I am done with this class I think it was a good and useful experience for my undergraduate. Each assignment was designed to provide us with the necessary tools for making a final project that summarized what we learned in the class. The Drafts, Perfect Paragraphs, and Methods projects allowed me to reflect on how me and others write, and made me aware of the importance of communicating efficiently in science. The Proposal and the Project offered me the opportunity to work in a team environment were different ideas were exchanged, and it helped me both on my team work and problem-solving skills. This class has made me more aware of the importance of having good communication skills, and it has helped me improve my writing.

Before starting to work on the Project assignment, I was concerned because the species that we had initially thought to use had only two specimens left in my lab. Our plan was to run trials with at least three different spiders, so in the end we had to use a different species of crab spider that was more abundant at my lab. This changed slightly the direction of our project, but in the end was a positive experience because it tested our ability to deal with the unexpected, and scientists usually have to cope with similar problems on a daily basis. As well, there was practically no research about color change for our new species, and our experiment allowed us to make some observations about different color tonalities among spiders of the same species. Regarding the poster, I would have displayed the introduction section horizontally below the title to make a better use of the space, but the overallwork of the group resulted into a final product that I liked. I already had experience making posters, but the Moodle assignment helped me reflect about the qualities that a good poster should have, and proved to be key when designing ours.

The Proposal project was probably the most challenging assignment of this class, because it involved the coordination and agreement of a team. Before I started working on this assignment, I thought of some feasible ideas for a project with spiders, and talked with professor Brewer about them. This made me doubt between working with crab spiders and color choice, or cellar spiders and light placement, because I liked both ideas. In the end I decided to work with the crab spiders because I wanted to extrapolate the experiment to connect it with the ecology of local fields and the interaction between crab spiders, bees, and flowers. My plan was to research on common flowers that are pollinated by local bees to see if there was a preferrence towards a particular species, and then use the color of that flower in the arena trials to test if the spider would choose the color of the flowers that have more chances of being visited by its prey. But my group wanted to make the experiment more simple and eventually convinced me to use the RGB color model as the backgrounds for the arena trials. Nonetheless, looking back on this project I think that we made the right decision because we didn't have enough time for undertaking such a large scale project. I was glad that Alicia and Brad decided to continue with our project when we finished the Proposal and had the chance to switch to other groups.

Before I started the Methods project I had a more or less clear idea of how my figure should look, because I spent the summer working at my lab with spiders and already knew of places around campus with spider webs. Nonetheless, writing about how I produced my figure resulted more challenging than I thought, because I had to trace back in my mind all the details involved in the production of the figure. As I later saw in class during the presentations, having good communication skills is very important for doing science, since facts that one may take for granted can be unknown for another person and thus obtain a different result. Thanks to the Methods project, now I am more aware of my readers when I write, and I try to explain things with enough detail for them to follow through my writing.

I remember the first day of class, when professor Brewer gave each of us a cellar spider in a small plastic cup and told us to write a description of it in detail. It was a good introduction for both the Drafts and the Perfect Paragraphs assignments, and my first Perfect Paragraph came out of that class. Having written a few drafts about the subject in my notes, when I started writing that assignment I had no trouble thinking of new things to add, and it allowed me to think more about how to improve it as best as possible. At the beginning of the semester I used the Perfect Paragraphs assignment as an opportunity to write about things that I find interesting in science, but as exams and other assignments came I focused my work towards improving writings for my classes. Regarding the comments that we had to post weekly, it helped me think about how we write and the mistakes that I should avoid. Nonetheless, as the semester came to its end, I started noticing that other people's paragraphs had improved in quality and commenting on them proved to be more difficult. I feel that a similar thing happened for some people that commented on my paragraphs, since I sometimes struggled to understand their comments. The Perfect Paragraphs assignment has helped me think more about the content of my writing, and now I think more about how to approach written assignments in order to make myself clear.

I feel like the Drafts weekly assignment was useful for improving my organization skills, and also my approach towards writing better papers. Before starting to work on the Drafts assignments for the first time, I thought that it would be difficult to write six drafts in the blog for each week. It seemed like a small task as professor Brewer explained it to the class, especially if we organized it in the reccomended 30 minute slots, but I wasn't sure if I would find enough material to write about during the semester. At the beginning of the semester I struggled to write drafts, but once a few weeks in the flow of classes allowed me to come up with enough material for writing. I think that writing drafts for this class helped me a lot in other classes. In particular, Animal Movement required me to write six one-page summaries of scientific papers, and thanks to this practice I was able to condense my ideas into more effective paragraphs.

As concluded in the review, fish locomotion plays a role in ocean dynamics, especially in large scale movements like migrations, which contributes to the mixing of nutrients and temperature. Therefore, studies in fish kinematics can serve to conservation efforts by providing estimates for the fishing industry in order to avoid overfishing. Regarding the use of robot models for studying fish locomotion, they are useful for controlling certain parameters in an experimental setting, but do not portray the whole picture of such movements. In order to understand locomotion, researchers should take a holistic approach that considers often neglected factors like behaviors that enhance such movements.

The Giant kingfisher bat (Pteropus alcedinidus) is a member of the Pteropodidae family, of the order Chiroptera (bats). Members of this family are commonly referred to as megabats or fruit bats, and are characterized by their relatively large size. Like most bats in the Pteropodidae family, the Giant kingfisher bat has lost the ability to echolocate, and relies instead on its sight for locating food. Its diet consists mainly of fish that live in the mangroves and coast of the Malay Archipelago, but usually supplements it with fruit during the weeks previous to the mating season.

The Giant kingfisher bat (Pteropus alcedinidus) is a member of the Pteropodidae family, of the order Chiroptera (bats). Members of this family are commonly referred to as megabats or fruit bats, and are characterized by their relatively large size. Like most bats in the Pteropodidae family, the Giant kingfisher bat has lost the ability to echolocate, and relies instead on its sight for locating food. Its diet consists mainly of fish that live in the mangroves and coast of the Malay Archipelago, but usually supplements it with fruit during the weeks previous to the mating season.

This species is unique among bats because it is the only one that dives into the water for catching its prey. Its unusual beak-shaped snout, which resembles the beak of a kingfisher, provides streamlining and minimizes the impact against the surface to avoid displacing water and scaring away fish. Unlike most mammals, which have seven cervical vertebrae, the Giant kingfisher bat has five cervical vertebrae and they are surrounded by thick layers of soft tissue. This gives the bat a shorter neck with a shock absorption mechanism that greatly reduces the risk of injury when penetrating the water.

Pteropus alcedinidus has also developed a series of adaptations for navigating underwater during short periods of time. Its nostrils and reduced ears close underwater, and due to having its eyes protected by a full nictating membrane it mostly relies on its highly sensitive long whiskers for detecting its prey or other obstacles. Nonetheless, this species has good vision on land and uses it for detecting potential prey and fruit instead of echolocation, which has been lost in favor of smaller ears that provide better streamlining.

In order to catch fish, the Giant kingfisher bat soars over the water taking advantage of the high aspect ratio of its wings to save energy. When it localizes its prey, the bat plunges into the water and uses its sensitive whiskers to catch it. In order to move towards the surface, special fibers in the patagium or wing membrane of the bat get harder and serve as a paddle to displace water more efficiently. The unusually high number of mitochondria in its cells, along with a highly vascularized tissue, enable the bat to power its muscles to rise to the surface and fly into the sky once again.

Apart from fin oscillation patterns, medial and paired fish fins help balance torques and generate thrust. These fins can undergo significant deformation during swimming, and are actively regulated for propulsion and maneuvering. Fish are capable of producing these morphological changes because they have independent intrinsic fin musculature. Concerning the vortex patterns produced by shark tails, the data suggests that they may be the result of active control of the shark tail by intrinsic musculature. The results from the skin denticle study indicate that the denticles improve swimming performance, reducing drag forces and possibly increasing thrust.