A quarter of the way through the semester. Weather has not been on our side. For week 3 we spent our time in lab practicing to film using some of the crayfish we had. Everyone got some crayfish escapes. We then moved to the computer lab to learn digitizing using the MTrackJ plugin for ImageJ. We used one of the praying mantis videos I had, and after we worked through the protocol, students started clicking (and clicking and clicking and clicking). They had an assignment due at the start of the next lab day tracking one point from one of the crayfish videos. Digitized points were graded based on this rubric. In lecture on week three we had a crash course in muscle physiology and energetics based off of Biewener and Patek Ch. 2. This lecture was way too long, almost two hours with no breaks. In the future I plan to break it up. Most students had muscle physiology in A&P or Animal Physiology, but not all.
Week 4 started with a cancelled field trip to the field station. So, we tried to collect in the Glen Arboretum behind our building, but within a minute it started to pour! Luckily there was some shelter from the rain. As we stood there, we talked about project ideas, what would they do with all the money and resources in the world. How long can a dragonfly fly for? Once the rain died down, we went back in and filmed some crickets jumping to again practice our filming techniques. We then headed to the computer lab to take our digitized points and start getting some basic kinematics and performance traits in R. They had an assignment due at the beginning of the next week using their tracked points to get maximum displacement, velocity, acceleration with plots (based off of code I provided), but also figure out how to obtain mean values. While things worked okay in the computer lab, they did not on their personal computers. Stay tuned for the next update to find out what we did next. Lecture week 4 focused on terrestrial locomotion, using Biewener and Patek Ch. 4 as a guide. We then discussed Full and Tullis 1990 on cockroach running and energetics at different inclines.
Its interesting to teach this material over an extended period of time. Usually I do a truncated version of form and cuntion in one lab period. Having the time to spend learning to film, digitize, and use R has been nice. Discussing papers has helped think about research ideas and practicing filming on different animals has helped them see how to think about filming and analyzing different animals and performance.