1.4 Students will be able to analyze critically and apply the major principles of organismal biology.

As someone who has loved animals and how they work for my whole life, this is my favorite subject in biology. I love to learn about how and why organisms work, evolve, adapt and thrive in environments. The concepts like biodiversity, actual anatomical structure and their physiology is so interesting. I was first able to learn and talk about animals in Biology 251, Intro to Ecology and Evolution sophomore year. While learning about evolution, I became fascinated with how communities work. For this course, we completed a number of article reflections prior to attending class for a discussion. I enjoyed these because I could take the time to dive into the topics. The most memorable one was from a publication in 1960, which is integral for this field. I remember trying my best to get through all of the jargon to understand the main topics, but it wasn’t easy. I like the challenge of reading articles outside of my comfort zone but that does not make understanding them any less difficult. I ended up getting an A for this reflection and I feel like I really earned it. I spent a lot of time researching terminology and trying to understand complex ideas like how populations indeed have a limitation on size due to external factors like environmental resources and space. I think this paper really built my confidence up. Here is a link to the article reflection. The next course I was able to take about organisms was vertebrate morphology. This class remains to be one of my favorites at Longwood. It was challenging and everything I was looking for in an animal related class. This class focused on the anatomical side of organisms, and I got to dissect a cat and a dogshark. I learned about how animals have evolved over time to be better adapted to their environments through evolving lungs, wings, feet, and everything in between. The best part was that we also got to complete article discussions. This time, I had more knowledge and confidence to do it. My favorite article that I got to read for this class was about how we can use comparative anatomy to visualize evolution. The article was about Ardi, a female skeleton from 4.4 million years ago, and how she might rewrite how we understand human evolution. This is because prior to her, the oldest known skeleton we had was from 3.2 million years ago. Not only is it so fascinating to read about artifacts, it’s even cooler to understand the bone markers used to compare them. I really enjoy this kind of comparative research and I am so glad I was able to take this course. Here is a link to this article reflection.