Dec 12 2010
*Note: We only got to spend a few minutes discussing this topic the last day before exams, so I am including this nice post by IanN from last year. There are two “Human Population Problems” that we discussed in class: The Annual Growth Rate (AGR) of a population is too high, leading to problems with [...]
Dec 10 2010
If you enjoyed the TEDTalk by Hans Rosling, I wanted give a chance to learn more about his work. First, here is yesterday’s video if you want to watch it again: Second, if any of you are interested in more about the stats in the presentation go to Dr. Rosling’s web site: http://www.gapminder.org/ Explore the [...]
Dec 10 2010
*Note: This is a cross post done by ConnerV in the other class with minor adjustments by Mr. W (in parentheses). Today in class we talked about the Demographic Transition. We used this model to discuss how countries change over time to fit our four stages. The four stages were: Pre-Industrial: Countries without industry. Usually [...]
Dec 07 2010
Monday in class we learned about factors that affect the Crude Birth Rate (CBR) and the Crude Death Rate (CDR). First, however, we viewed a poulation map of the world which is as follows. The larger the country the larger the total population. We then reviewed the equation for AGR, also called the Rate of [...]
Dec 05 2010
Friday in class we learned about human population growth rates. We watched a video. Here is a link to that http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BbkQiQyaYc The world population is around 6.9 billion people right now. Up to 1800- 1 billion 1938- 2 billion 1960-3 1975-4 1987-5 1999-6 This graph shows the growth in population over time for humans. It [...]
Dec 01 2010
Note: This was posted by WillW in the other class-might be helpful as we did not assign a scribe that day. The Isle Royale simulation in class points out the significance of free population growth, the presence of predators, and the availability of food in an ecosystem. The three simulations that we did focus on [...]
Nov 30 2010
Population biologists/ecologists rarely have the luxury of counting every organism in an ecosystem or biome, but they still have to try in order to monitor relative biodiversity or determine if a population is threatened or endangered. Today we simulated a popular sampling technique known as mark and recapture. While we used pretzel goldfish as tagged [...]
Nov 17 2010
In class on Tuesday we learned about species populations. A population is a group of individuals of a species that live in a particular area. Populations coevolve based off of the five relationships we learned about in the previous unit (mutualism, comensalism, parasitism, predation, and competition). All populations of any species contain these five characterisitics: [...]
