rharrison's blog

Equidae is a family in the order Perussidactyla in class mammalia. They include horses, donkeys, zebras, burros, and asses. It also included quagga but they went extinct in 1883. They are in the order perussidactyla becuase they have an odd number of toes the center of weight traveling through the 3rd or middle digit. In this case, those in family Equidae have a single functional toe. The single toe or hoof makes Equidae the most cursorial, or most adapted for running, perussidactyla in the modern age. Equidae are grazers meaning their diet consists of grass and they are hindgut fermentors in order to digest grass. They are also polygnous. A single male stallion controls the access to multiple females. The stallions can get agressive and if another approaches, they can bite and kick with their powerful legs to ward them off. 

Evolutionaryly, horses developed in present day North America, Europe, and Asia. They were small, dog sized animals that lived in forests and had more toes. Over time, as the global climate was changing and north america became more grassland, the horses grew in size and reduced the number of digits to adapt. Eventually, modern horses became extinct in the Americas and were not reintroduced until the Europeans travelled there. 

With the Methods Project of the Writing in Biology Spring 2019 class, I found that when writing a procedure, everything has to be written down. A procedure needs to be written step-by-step as the experiment is conducted so others can get as close to the original results as possible. The interaction I focused on for this project was an interaction between koi fish and the plants around their pond at the Durfree Conservatory on the UMass campus.

Factors in my methods were:

Time of day

Point of entry into the conservatory

The fish as they are moving and living creatures

Temperature

Differences in my original figure (Figure 1) and the replica made by Max Scheller include:

Scale of the fish and plant subject

Color of subject

Figure border size

Arrow type

Photo glare and watermarks

The Methods Project for Writing in Biology is a tool to show how important it is for the scientific community to conduct research with procedures that allow for an experiment to be replicated and achieve the same results. For the methods project, I had to make a figure showing an interaction between two species around the University of Massachusetts campus.

I choose to use Durfree Conservatory as a space to find one. Inside, there is a pond there with koi fish and plants surrounding it. I noticed that the fish sometimes nibble on the plants that either grow in the pond or those that happen to fall in.

Seeing as the building was an enclosed, temperature controlled environment where the plants and the pond are maintains without much outside influence, I thought it would be a perfect area. The subjects of the study were not affected by the outside winter temperature and snow. Also, both the fish and plants are stuck in one easily accessible area. As the conservatory has a glass ceiling, the time of day matters in order to get a photo with sufficient light and the conservatory is only open from 10 am to 4 pm on weekdays. By going late morning, the sun is overhead and gives enough light for the photos to be taken.

The original figure (Figure 1) is composed of three photos taken at 11:00 am at Durfree Conservatory’s koi pond. The top left hand corner has a photo of multiple orange, yellow, and white fish swimming in the water. The top right hand corner has a photo of plants along the edge of the pond. And the bottom panel of Figure 1 has a photo showcasing an orange koi and plant in the center of the pond.

Differences in the original figure and the replicate (Figure 2) include scale size, border thickness, arrows, amount and color of subjects in focus, glare in some panels of the figures, and figure watermark.

Compared to the original figure, the replicate figure (Figure 2) has a zoomed in view of the fish, the plant, and their interaction. The scale for the photos are different. The photo in the top left corner of Figure 2 is focused on a single, white koi fish and appears larger. The plants in the top right corner of each figure are also different based on background. The bottom panel of Figure 2 also features a single koi fish instead of multiple in the frame like that of Figure 1. Border size in Figure 1 is thinner than that of Figure 2. There is also a glare and watermark on the panels of Figure 1 and not on Figure 2. The arrows indicating subjects between the three panels of each Figure are different based on feather end type.

DISCUSSION:

The goal, or the mission, of this project was to create a figure that illustrated the interaction between the koi fish and plants in Durfree conservatory. The replicated figure (Figure 2) completed that task but with differences in format. In my methods, I did not specify some components that could have made the replicate more like the original .

I did not specify how many koi fish were to be present in the frame when taking the photos. That should have been a factor I should have taken into consideration for my methods. By counting the number of fish in the frame, their color, and their relative size to one another and other objects in the pond, the replicate would have resulted in three yellow, two orange, and two white koi fish. With that amount of fish in the frame of the photo for the top left of the figure, the fish would be shown at a smaller scale rather than that with a single fish.

The original figure has a glare/reflection of the glass ceiling in the water in multiple panels, while the replicate features little to none. This could be because of the size scale and zoom of the camera on the subjects in Figure 2 or could have been due to the photo being taken at a different time of day. An 11 am time for a school week may mean that the creator of Figure 2 was in class, off campus, or otherwise busy. I myself had a class thirty minutes after I took the photos of the interaction.

For the plant panel at the top right of the figure, I also did not state the specific direction in which I took the photo of the plants. The original figure did not feature the stairs of the conservatory like the replicate did. I took the photo at an angle from the bridge but the inclusion of the stairs in the replicate implies that the photo was taken from the center of the bridge towards the entrance of the building stated in the methods.

As for making the figure itself, I did state the scale of the border, but I did not indicate what the specific scale was and where to find it on the page. Looking back now there were two scale options and a “4” of one is more thick than a “4” from the other and that can account for the border thickness difference. For the arrow, I stated I used “an arrow with a feathered end” and while at the time I thought that was specific, looking at the style of the other arrows it was not. Multiple arrows in the tab of arrows on the format website had “feathered ends”, I had just chosen the first one I saw. The original figure also features a watermark from the website that is not on the replicate. This implies that perhaps the replicate was not made using the same website as the original or the creator was able to get rid of it. I did not mention the watermark in my methods so whether or not to include it was up to the creator.

Mammalian speciation expanded in two periods; 80-90 million years ago and 60-65 million years ago. For the 80-90 million years period, the theory for speciation is the super continent Pangea began to split apart and as the climate change so do niches. This may have led to some exctinctions that allowed small mammals to fill new niches and rise. 60-65 million years ago was the exctinction of the dinosaurs, which allowed for more environments, niches, and resourses for the early mammals to use.

Eutherians are a subclass of class Mammalia. The word eutheria comes from the Greek for "true" (Eu) and "wild beast" (Theria). Eutherians are unlike metatherians (marsupials) as they have a true placenta and give birth to more precocial young. The oldest eutherian fossil found so far is the Eomaia. It was found in China (Paleartic zoogeographical zone) and dates back to the Cretaceous period. It is though to be a small and insectivorous early mammal.

Eutherians all share some distinct characteristics. Eutherians follow a primitive dental formula with slight variation based on species. Both the upper and lower jaw have 3 incisors, 1 canine, 4 premolars, and 3 molars, with a premolar that is clearly different from the molar. Females have a chorloallantoic placenta, a vagina (some do have a cloaca), a cervic, a uterus, and ovaries (again with variation based on species) and males have a penis bone or baculum. 

Eutherians are another subclass of class Mammalia. The word eutheria comes from the Greek for "true" (Eu) and "wild beast" (Theria). Eutherians are unlike metatherians (marsupials) as they have a true placenta. The oldest eutherian fossil is the Eomaia found in China and dates back to the Cretaceous period. It is though to be small and insectovorous. Mammalian speciation expanded in two periods; 80-90 million years ago and 60-65 million years ago. For the 80-90 million years period the theory for speciation then is the super continent Pangea began to split apart and as the climate change so do niches, leading to some exctinction that would allow small mammals to fill new ones and rise. 60-65 million years ago was the exctinction of the dinosaurs allowing for more environments, niches, and resourses for the early mammals to use. Eutherians all share some distinct characteristics. Eutherians follow a primitive dental formula with slight variation based on species: Both the upper and lower jaw have 3 incisors, 1 canine, 4 premolars, and 3 molars, with a premolar that is clearly different from the molar. Females have a chorloallantoic placenta, vagina cervic uterus and ovaries again with variation based on species and males have a penis bone or baculum. 

On Wednesday afternoon, my Mammalogy lab section took a trip to Beneski Museum of Natural History at Amherst College. I had never been there before so it was exciting. On the main floor, there were huge skeletons of Ice Age era mammals. There was an irish elk, mastadon, sabertooth cats, dire wolf, cave bear, and a mammoth. They also had cases with skin and hair samples that had been preserved for thousands of years. We learned that many of the fossils there were found by Amherst College expeditions in the 1800s and 1900s. We had a worksheet to do while there looking at the exhibits. For the fossils we had to identify the scientific name (Genus and species) and make conclusions on diet and locomotion based on tooth shape and the proportion of limbs. 

The goal or the mission of this project was to create a figure that illustrated the interaction between the koi fish and plants in Durfree conservatory. The replicated figure completed that task but with small differences in format. In my methods I realized that I did not specify some key components that could have made both figures more identical. I did not specify how many koi fish were to be present in the frame when taking the photo, if it was supposed to be zoomed in or out, or the color of the koi. As for making the figure itself, I did state the scale of the border, but I did not indicate what scale and where to find it on the page. For the arrow, I stated I used “an arrow with a feathered end” and while at the time I thought that was specific, it really was not looking at the style of the other arrows. Overall, both figures used the arrows to point out plant and fish interacting.

I have a mammalogy lab exam on coming up on Monday. One third of the test is on marsupial phylogenetic orders and families. Marsupials are mammals without real placenta. Non placental mammals are in a subclass of Mammalia called called Theria and whithin that an infraclass called Metatheria. Within the infraclass of Metatheria there are seven orders. The common synapomorphies of the metatherians include the presence of palatal vacuities (holes in the palate, a hooked angular process in the dentary bone  (except the koalas), a deciduous premolar, twinned entoconid and hypoconulid, and stlyar shelf with cusps on the upper molars

In Order Diprotodontia there are eight families. Potoroidae, Acrobatidae, Petauridae, Pseudocheiridae, Macropodidiae, Vombatidae, Phascolarctidae, and Phalangeridae.

In Order Peramelemorphia there is on family which is Peramelidae.

In Order Dasyuridae has one family - Dasyuromorphia.

In Order Didelphimorphia it is also monotypic with familiy Didelphidae and same with Order Microbiotheria with family Microbiotheriidae.