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Canis latrans, Canis lupus, and Canis lupus familiaris are three different species. According to the article, Yes, eastern coyotes are hybrids, but the ‘coywolf’ is not a thing, by Roland Kays mentions that Canis latrans are hybrid species composed of three genetic swapping among the three types of Canis groups. Each type of them have a separate ratio of how much each gene it is composed of. The article writes that the three species are biologically possible to interbreed with one another but preferably not to mate with each other. I think this is the vital part which supports that these species are no longer the same because within a population, species will not have an urge to kill one another within the group. However, the fact that these three species will exhibit enmity is a strong evidence that they are separate.

My name is Ryan DiGregorio and I am a junior at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. I am on the pre-med track but my major is Biology. I am from Norton, Massachusetts which is in eastern mass. Things that I do in my spare time are usually based around sports and friends. I play baseball or any other sport my friends are interested in, and when I’m not playing sports I am just hanging out with my friends. My favorite thing about UMass Amherst so far has been how diverse it is. My home town is small and not very diverse so this definitely something new and exciting to me. Some important strengths of my generation are staying informed and being tech savvy. Something that I think our generation needs to improve on is focusing on the future. I feel as though people focus too much on what is happening now and not what the effect on their future will be.  

Fish use body undulations to swim, which create water movement with great acceleration behind the fish. The form of this wave is similar among most fish, however waves vary in number, speed, and amplitude change. There is little known about how the center of mass (COM) of fish changes with swimming speed. However, it is known that the COM can change in three dimensions: surge, sway, and heave. The COM of three fish were calculated. Surge COM displacement and acceleration in eels and bluegill sunfish oscillated at twice the tail beat frequency, while the sway COM displacement and acceleration oscillated at the tail beat frequency. Surge COM oscillations did not change with swimming speed, while sway oscillations increased with increasing swimming speed. Sway amplitudes increased with increased swimming speed in bluegill sunfish, but the same was not true for the eels. 

Vaccines work in a complex way. The human immune system is broken into two parts, the innate immune system and the adaptive immune system. The innate immune system is made up of components such as skin, mucus, and macrophages that engulf cells to destroy them. The innate immune system is something that all humans have. Vaccines work with the adaptive immune system. This part of the immune system can remember antigens by producing antibodies that bind to them. Vaccines expose the adaptive immune system to weakened or dead antigens. The adaptive immune system builds antibodies against the weakened or dead antigen so that when a live version of that antigen invades the body an immune response can be triggered immediately. Without the adaptive immune system the innate immune system would be overwhelmed and the host human would experience symptoms of disease.

          In James Cameron's film, Avatar, an alien tribe on the distant planet of Pandora fights the human invaders bent on mining their forest home. In The Nature of Things episode, titled The Real Avatar, the indigenous people of the Cordillera del Condor area of Peru face a similar predicament, as they fight against the Peruvian government and private mining and oil interests to defend their home, in an effort to preserve both biodiversity and their traditional way of life. Though there had been a previous agreement between the tribe and the government to establish a protected conservation area, the election of a new president, Alan García, led to the passage of new laws to open that land to privatization and development in the name of profit. These decrees disregarded the prior promises made to the indigenous people, and instead granted access to corporations, including a Canadian mining company and an American oil company. According to environmental scientists, these extraction activities threaten to pollute the area. The mountain range where many of these private development projects are meant to take place overlaps with a portion of the Amazon Rainforest, and also acts as the sources from which rivers flow. The local tribes rely on these ecological features, traditionally viewing their environment as a living thing which provides for them and which they must protect. Though the tribes have engaged in impassioned protests against the actions of corporate interests, the continued lobbying by mining, oil, and other companies for permission to exploit the resources of the tribal lands has thus far won out against the pleas of the indigenous people and the concerns raised by environmental scientists.

Overall differences in the panels of the figures were first noted. This included the shade of color used in each square of the panels in the two figures. In the original, the green is lighter in panel A. In figure 1, panel B, the color used was rose, but the replication, a color closer to maroon is used. The shade of purple used is lighter in panel C of the original, but the blue is a lighter shade in the replication in panel D of figure 2. The labeling of the figures are different as well. In the original multi-panel figure, the labels are placed in the furthest corner of the panels, but in the replication, the labels are placed in the corner of the images themselves. Furthermore, no captions that detail the species and their interactions are provided in the replication. Lastly, the quality of the images were immediately noticed as well, with the clearer images being in the original multi-panel figure.

One thing that I noticed was that the background and the sizes were different in both the original and the replicate. The first picture (replicate) shows that there is snow on the ground compared to the original and there are also more birds in the original picture than the replicate. The first picture from the original also shows that there are eight geese, but in the replicate there are only two and a tree trunk. On the second picture, the two differences were that, one picture was taken on land/grass (original), and the other one was taken in the water (replicate). There are only one female and a male duck from the original versus the replicate which consists of eight male and two female ducks.

 

The methods project required students to create a multi-panel scientific figure of an interspecific interaction. A methods section was then created by the student to describe in detail how to replicate the figure created. The purpose of the project was to be able to see if the methods that were written could lead to an accurate replication of the multi-panel figure created. There were three separate panels in the figure that consisted of lichen and a tree. The differences observed in this figure was of background, color, and labeling. These differences were a result from the differences in weather and positioning of the photo.

The imaging software used to create the figures may also account for the difference in many factors between them. Figure 1 was created through Inkscape and Figure 2 may have been created through Microsoft Word. Image size differences may be explained by software as Word limits the margin sizes to one inch by default, whereas in Inkscape, the images are not bound to any range. This also explains the letter label sizing, as font size 70 in Inkscape appears differently than font size 70 in Word. Word also does not have the same centering functions of the letter labels as Inkscape, also accounting for this difference between the two figures. Discrepancies in arrow shape and size are also explained by this software difference. In Word, arrows appear blue with a large width by default. In Inkscape, one can edit the arrow color and width. The arrowheads are also different as Inkscape offers a variety to choose from of different ang while Word has the singular arrowhead of 90 degrees. The black line in Panel C and green backgrounds of images in Figure 2 may also be remnants from Word imaging that Inkscape does not possess.