Integrated Teaching of Organismal Biology: ILI Award

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This award provides funds to the Section of Ecology and Systematics at Cornell University to purchase equipment for two introductory courses which were introduced to infuse the excitement and experimental approach of modern organismal biology into the curriculum. The courses will enroll 100 to 120 students per year, and approximately one-third of the Biological Sciences majors at Cornell and half of the Natural Resources majors will take one or both of the courses. Laboratories will be hands-on exercises for the students. Functional Ecology (BioSci 272) integrates information about the ecology, physiology, and behavior of vertebrates in a phylogenetic context. Weekly laboratories alternate surveys of the vertebrates with experiments that illustrate characteristic physiological features of those taxa. The twice-weekly laboratories in Functional and Comparative Morphology (BioSci 274) combine dissection of preserved material with electromyography, motion analysis, and morphometries in an hypothesis-testing approach to morphology. Funds will be used to purchase laboratory instruments (for osmometry, telemetry, oxygen analysis, and electromyography), video equipment (for motion analysis and morphometry), a treadmill and air-flow visualizer (for studies of locomotion), and microcomputers (for data collection and analysis). The equipment will be shared by the new courses and used in an advanced organismal biology courses and for undergraduate projects. The grantee is matching this award with non-Federal sources.