Learning Enrichments

The past week has given me an opportunity to explore the realm of research and the topic of animal science even further. Learning how to take full advantage of the university's research resources and being exposed to several different aspects of animal science gave me much more insight into this topic.

The library orientation presented a lot of information that seemed quite intimidating at first because there was so much information to absorb. Because college papers often require scholarly and academic sources, I was slightly confused on where I would obtain these types of sources and how to interpret them, as many resources require a fee to acquire. However, as a student of the institution, I am able to access these sources. This fact particularly stuck out to me because I often do not find reliable sources on the Internet and knowing that I can access professional papers and publishers made me confident in the credibility of my future papers.

The six TIME articles that were assigned were all very engaging and fun to read altogether. The two articles that stood out to me the most was "Why Cats and Dogs Think Differently About You" and "Intelligence." In the former, this article explained the history of domestication of cats and dogs and how their characteristics changed over time as humans began to incorporate them into their lives. I found it particularly interesting, but not surprising, that cats could easily turn feral and survive on their own without the help of humans unlike dogs. It demonstrates that the way animals are domesticated always defines the way they interact with humans as well. After all, it was cats that decided that they could form a mutual relationship with humans while humans used dogs for their own survival. This made me more curious about the topic of nature vs. nurture, because dogs were trained and bred so that they were even more passive to humans and so that humans could use them for work.

In the "Intelligence" article, I found it surprising that certain primates could have the grammatical intelligence of a two year old human and could learn to effectively use and construct grammatical sentences to signal its intentions. Even parrots, which are known to just mimic sounds, could prove its skills by identifying a new object by using words that it had learned previously. I am now more curious about what other capabilities animals can achieve if they are just given the time and space to do it.

Part of the preliminary research I did this week involved learning about important biologists and different technical terms that describe the way animals communicate with one another. For example, Edward O. Wilson, an important biologist, helped discover pheromones, a chemical substance transmitted through the air that attracts mates during breeding season for insects. I researched forms of communication for several types of species, including humans, who have the power of speech, and cetacean species, which use echolocation.

On social media outlets, I posted several articles about the biologists I researched onto my Twitter and saved other articles about famous biologists onto my Delicious account, including Toni Frohoff and Jack Bradbury. I followed my fellow classmates Daniel and Yajaira on Twitter in order to see how their articles also correlated to our group presentation on "Communications."