rharrison's blog

In my mammalogy lecture last week, we learned about zoogeography and its effect on early and present day marsupials. First off, zoogeography is a method to describe the local and global distribution of species based on the environment. There are seven zoogeographical regions around the world. They are: Nearctic (modern day North America), Neotropical (South America), Ethiopian (Africa), Oriental (Southern Asia), Australian (Australia), and Palearctic (Eurasia). With the topic of marsupials, we discussed evolution and their historical regions. Most marsupials today are only found in Australia, with the exeption of the opossum and the colocolo, but millions of years ago they were in modern day Antartica and all over north and South America back when the continents were connected. When the continents split, the isolation and change in climates led to extinction of early marsupials in Antartica and most of North and South America. 

The Methods Project is a tool to show us, as a class, 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, we had to make a figure showing an interaction between two species around us. I choose to use Dunfree Conservatory as a space to find one. There is a pond there with koi fish with plants surrounding it and I noticed that the fish sometimes nibble on the plants that either grow in the pond or happen to fall in. Seeing as the building was an enclosed, emperature controlled environment where the plants and the pond are maintains without much outside influence, I thought it would be a perfect area. That helped with the control factors of this project as the both the fish and plants are stuck in one area for easy access and the outside weather wouldn’t affect them.

As said before, the goal or the mission of this project was to create a figure that illustrated the interaction between the koi fish and plants in Dunfree 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.

The journal I viewed for homework was for aquatic mammals. The intructions for submitting writings was on their websites homepage. Submittions they accept include full articles, reports, notes, and letters to the editor. It says that the journal accepts review papers but authors have to directly contact the editors. The editors of the journal offer "early stage of manuscript preparation" consultations if the subject material make it difficult to follow formatting instructions and the paper is 25 or more printed pages. The journal requires manuscripts to be in a Word document and not a PDF, to have a cover letter attached, and any figures and tables included as a separate file when submitted.

In Mammalogy last week we learned about zoogeography and marsupials. Zoogeography is a way to describe the local and global distribution of the species based on environments. There are 7 zoogeographical regions. They are: neoarctic (modern North America), neotropical (South America), ethiopian (Africa), oriental (Southern Asia), australian (Australia), and palearctic (Eurasia). With the topic of marsupials, we discussed evolution and their historical regions. Most marsupials are only found in Australia but millions of years ago they were in modern day Antartica and all over north and South America back when the continents were connected. When the continents split, the isolation and change in climates led to extinction of early marsupials in Antartica and most of North and South america. 

Figure 1. Whiskers. Cat whiskers are long and thin, used like another sensory organ. Photo by Wapiko athttps://www.flickr.com/photos/wapiko57/ 

Land mammals have different forms of stances. The main three catagories are plantigrade, digitigrade, and unguligrade. Plantigrade means that animal's heal touches the ground as it moves and usually indicates an ambulatory or walking way of movement. Examples of plantigrades are bears, apes, and humans. Digitigrades are animals that stand on their toes or digits when the walk like cats and dogs. They are usually more of a cursorial or running motion. Lastly unguligrades are animals that move on their hooves or toenails, featured in cursorial moving animals like horses and deer. 

Cheetahs are the world's  fastest land animal. They can reach speeds up to 68 miles per hour (110 km/h). Gazelles can also run fast about 50 mph (80 km/h). With that in mind they are able to escape from a cheetah's grasp. A cheetah is a smallish cat, they take longer strides at a faster pace. They can generate energy quickly but they also can lose it just as quickly. A cheetah can only run at its top speed for 400 yards. Gazelles are large African deer, they take shorter strides at a slower pace and have elastic recoil to store and use energy. They have great endurance, able to go 5468 yards (5 km) at top speed. That is a lot further than the cheetah. The gazelles can also change direction fast and easily due to their elastic recoil. So while they are not as fast as the cheetah, gazelles have ways to escape predation.

Based on the article and Mayr’s definition of a species, it is correct to say that coyotes (Canis latrans), wolves (Canis lupus), and dogs (Canis lupus familiaris) are separate species. The article mentions that in the past, and today, that all three species had the ability to breed with one another, but in Mayr’s definition there is an emphasis on “interbreeding natural populations.” In his article Kays says the last recent account of wolf and coyote mating took place a hundred years ago and was due to low numbers of wolves in the Great Lakes area. This forced both species to interact. The same occurred between dogs and coyotes as coyotes began moving east but could not find others and instead bred with feral dogs. Kays states that while interbreeding can happen, they are usually exclusive within their own group.

Based on the article and Mayr’s definition of a species, I think that it is correct to say that coyotes (Canis latrans), wolves (Canis lupus), and dogs (Canis lupus familiaris) are separate species. The article does mention that in the past, and certainly today, that all three species have the ability to breed with one another, but in Mayr’s definition there is an emphasis on “interbreeding natural populations.” In his article Kays says the last recent account of wolf and coyote mating took place a hundred years ago and was due to low numbers of wolves in the Great Lakes area, maybe caused by overhunting which would not be a natural occurrence. This forced both species to interact in order to try and repopulate. The same occurred between dogs and coyotes as coyotes began moving east but could not find others and instead bred with feral dogs. Kays also states that while interbreeding can happen, its not preferred between each of the species, that they rather be exclusive within their own group. Based on that, I think its safe to call coyotes, wolves, and dogs their own species.