Designing and conducting an original field research project may seem a huge undertaking, and it is in fact a lot of effort.  This page is designed to give you some advice, encouragement, and general guidelines for a productive (and fun) original field research project.  Presentation of your study is also a requirement (written report, plus class presentation).

The basics: Work in groups of 2 students.  Cooperate because you both prepare a proposal, conduct the research, analyze the data, prepare and present the results, and submit one paper written in the style of the journal Animal Behaviour.  You both get the same grade.  The grade you receive depends on how good a job you did, not whether or not your hypothesis was supported or refuted by the data.

For your proposal and final paper, you will need to make extensive use of the original literature.  Some suggested journals that CSUN has in the library include: Animal Behaviour, Behavioral Ecology, Evolution, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B.  Others that CSUN apparently does not have include Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, Journal of Insect Behavior, Ethology.
 

What should we do?

Work on a question and a species or system that interests you.  Systematic behavioral observation can be tedious, so if you aren't curious and interested in the first place, then you will just be bored and do a lousy job.  On the good side, it is almost always the case that the more you observe and learn, the more interesting everything becomes.

Choose to work with an abundant and easily located species; insects are generally a good choice because they (1) can be very abundant, (2) are often less easily disturbed by human observers than many vertebrates, (3) do not generally require permits or permissions for research.

IMPORTANT!!! If you absolutely insist on working with a vertebrate animal, you need to fill out (with my help) and submit an Animal Care proposal for the California State University, Northridge, Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC).  This needs to be done as soon as is reasonably possible as you will not be able to start your work until you receive approval.  The forms are available here as a pdf or here as a MS Word .doc with fillable spaces.

Because this course has an ecological and evolutionary framework, dogs, cats, fishbowls, humans, and sparrows (among others) tend to be poor choices, as are projects conducted at malls, zoos, city parks, hardware stores etc.  For this reason, your project should be conducted at one of the course field sites.  This will also allow you much greater access to my wit, wisdom, and general expertise.

Limit yourself.  Your goal should be to produce a coherent quantitative analysis of one or two inter-related questions.  It is very likely that no one has ever studied just what you are studying, so become an expert on a few specific focused questions rather that do a mediocre job on a whole bunch of general topics.  We want quantitative quality, not qualitative quantity!
 

What tools will we need?

Probably not that much.  The most important is curiosity, second most is patience, after that, an assortment of paints, calipers, stopwatches, marker flags, tape-measures, string, thermometers, etc. etc. may be useful.  Ask, we'll try to provide it.
 

We will cover design, analysis, and presentation of results in lab.