All of the figures above show an organisms’ life stages. Yet one is more likely to produce accurate responses to questions of survival, genetic variation, and change over time. Can you guess which one? Life cycles morphed over time. Early textbooks included plates (A) or scenic images with an animal’s life stages scattered throughout (B). … More Ecology, Evolution, & the Life Cycle Figure
By analyzing 57 biology textbooks published over the past 50 years, Rabiya Ansari and I found that climate change content is, well, rather understated. Our paper appears in PLOS ONE. The main takeaways are:1) the average amount of content in the 2010s is just 67 sentences (about 3 pages in a 1000+ page textbook), and … More Biology Textbooks Fall Short on Climate Change
If you walked into a party full of animals, only one in 40 party animals would have a backbone. And that one would probably be a fish. Furry and feathered animals are great, but they make up 15,000 species out of almost 10 million (that’s less than 1% for any of you without a calculator … More Animal Diversity Personality Quiz
I love microscopes. The obsession started when I was a junior in college. I landed this awesome job identifying rotifers and other tiny organisms in many water samples (the project compared these animal assemblages in the river upstream and downstream of a nuclear power plant). It’s awe-inspiring to think that this whole world exists, with … More I LOVE MICROSCOPES
While the world is focused on a pandemic, there’s an even larger set of problems that we’d prefer to ignore. Human resource consumption passed the world’s ability to sustain it over 50 years ago. We’re in an extinction event (only the 6th one since in 600 million years). Glaciers melting, freshwater supplies decreasing, soil fertility … More A New Project: Immersive Experience in Sustainable Living (IESL)
As you may be aware, there’s a pandemic that’s shutting down much of the nation/world – including the University I work at. So how does an instructor shift the assignments in a Biological Illustration class? Blog posts and Coloring Book pages! Here’s our first guest artist, S. Kubik, who created this illustration of an owl … More Stress-Relief + Education = Awesome
By far, the most common question I get is: “How should I study?” The answer is not simple since I need to answer two other questions first… “How should I take notes?” and “When should I seek help?” TAKING NOTES: Many students consider more notes to be better notes. Faculty know that organized and thoughtful … More “How Should I Study?”
J.M. Landin 