Ecology and evolution have never been my strong suits. Even in high school, it was not my favorite subject. I think I struggle with ecology and evolution because I’m not fully invested in it. I do not make the effort to go out of my way to research something related to the subject or find it intriguing. The two artifacts I picked out for this page was a paper from Introduction to Ecology and Evolution (Biol. 251) about the correlation between weather and bird feeding habits of birds located on our campus and a paper from Conservation Biology (Biol. 330) about the decreasing population density of the Florida Panther.
In my Biology 251 paper, it was on a semester long group project where we had to design our own experiment, conduct multiple trials, analysis the data, write a formal lab report, and create a 45-minute PowerPoint on the lab. It was a challenging project given the fact I was not a fan of bird watching at all. I struggled to identify birds since I have no background experience with bird watching like my other group members. Doing this project taught me more about different types of birds and their different habits. It also taught me valuable lessons about working in a group for a long period of time. There were a lot of moments where I would get frustrated with my group members when their part of the work was not done. It taught me to take the initiative instead of just sitting back and being upset. It has helped me recently with a group project in another class where none of work was getting done besides my part so I had to step up and do extra work.
In my conservation biology lab report, the research indicated many reasons as to why increased human activity has contributed to the Florida Panther population decrease over the 20th and 21st centuries. I really learned a lot by doing this project and taking this course here at Longwood University. I had no idea that the Florida Panther existed until that lab report. The class also taught me about many other organisms that were extinct or close to extinction that I did not know about beforehand. Conservation Biology is something I am not interested in career-wise but I feel like it was good experience to take this class to get exposed to the topic.