Undergraduate computer lab designed to teach quantitative thinking in the context of Animal Behavior. Ideally, this lab would be taught as a supplement to a concurrent lecture course. Students are assumed to have completed one year of undergraduate calculus, and an introductory statistics class is useful.
Topics include bird song analysis (spectrograms), stochastic movement (diffusion and biased random walks), optimization of foraging strategies, evolutionary stable strategies (ess), spatial models of foraging, neural circuits, and frequency-dependent fitness. Math skills used include graphing, probability, arrays, logarithms, discrete-time models, and phase plane analysis.
The modules are designed to be self-contained lab exercises. They are Mathcad documents that the students complete for credit. Thus, students must have access to Mathcad (version 13 or higher). PDF versions of the modules are also provided for demonstration purposes.
