Zool430 at the University of Hawaiʻi!
What is this course?
This is an upper level class for people interested in learning comparative physiology via original research projects. We will learn physiology and apply our skills to reconstructing the physiological systems of an extinct animal. The lab allows students to see physiology in action in live-animal experiments illustrating heart regulation, muscle contraction, nerve conduction, and kidney function.
Throughout the course we will develop:
- Individual skills in finding and close reading of scientific literature, synthesis of information, presentation in oral and written forms.
- Collaboration skills in discussion, brainstorming, project organization and management, and collaborative writing.
- Practical skills in dissection, specimen preparation, troubleshooting instrumentation, data analysis, figure design.
We will cover metabolism and scaling, heat balance, the circulatory system, feeding and digetsion, neurons and signal propagation, sensory biology, muscles and motor control, biomechanics and locomotion, blood, ventilation and respiration, osmoregulation and excretion, hormonal control, reproduction, and the immune system.
Getting started
Please look over the Syllabus and Schedule under General Information. Lectures and Lab materials are provided under the Course Materials tab.
For the first day of lecture, please prepare by reading the paper on modeling Megalodon linked here.
For the first day of lab, please prepare by reading the short paper on blood pressure measurement, watching the podcast, and looking over the instrumentation lab manual and protocol linked here.
Acknowledgements
This course was developed and is maintained by Marguerite Butler.
Projects and homeworks have been adapted from courses developed by Adam Summers and Beth Brainerd.
Thank you to Stephanie Hicks for generously sharing the beautifully designed quarto template for this course.
The course materials are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Linked and embedded materials are governed by their own licenses. I assume that all external materials used or embedded here are covered under the educational fair use policy. If this is not the case and any material displayed here violates copyright, please let me know and I will remove it.