Analyze critically and apply the major principles of ecology and evolution.

Biology isn’t all about the cells and molecular science, it is also about organisms and how they interact. This is often studied in ecology and evolution classes. When in these courses, we usually discuss evolution, diversity, how animals interact in different environments, and how humans affect other organisms environments.

Ecology is usually studied with either the population, community, or ecosystem interactions of organisms, yet ecosystem is hard to study and is the topic that is least studied. In my undergraduate years, I learned most of this knowledge in Biology 251, Intro to Ecology and Evolution, and Biology 341, Ecology. Within these courses, I learned a lot about how organisms can interact with different species and organisms, and how humans can affect this.

In Biology 251, I performed an experiment, with my research partners, where we studied whether the weather, speed limit, and adjacent habitat had an impact on mortality of animals nearby. We went to two separate roads, one that has a lower speed limit than the other, and counted the amount of dead animal bodies within a 10-mile radius in two separate directions. This allowed us to get over 30 trials for each road, which allowed our data to be accurate. I’m not going to spoil the ending of the experiment as the presentation for this experiment is at the end of this reflection :).

I took another ecology course, Biology 341, which dives further into the concept of population, community, and ecosystem. In this class, I also performed an experiment in this course as well. This experiment was on how human industrialization impacts fern growth and where they grow as well. There is also a link to this experiment below as well.

These topics, ecology and evolution, are also staples when talking about Biology and understanding how all organisms interact with each other. In my future, the topic that is going to be used the most is evolution since understanding where organisms come from and the ones that are most similar to humans. Understanding this is really important because then understanding the way their body functions and how we can fix certain diseases with those organisms can help to better understand humans as well.

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Wg7dn9dMU_tJTFOCTWA-0Jwa9Fqa4WSRkonhqWTecXE/edit?usp=sharing

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