Technology Skills
WEB TECHNOLOGY
As a part of an assignment in a Zoology course, students were required to learn to navigate E-Bird. As discussed in my Zoology E-Portfolio, E-bird is a website where bird watchers from many different states share their bird sightings with one another.Along with learning to navigate this website, students must also add their own entries of bird sightings to its database. Displayed are the receipts indicating that I added my sightings to the E-Bird database. (If you want more information on my sightings, download the full powerpoint below.)
Zoology
E-Bird Receipts
COMPUTER MODELING
During my time in Dr. Viscido's I&R I have logged many hours running animal behavior, based computer models using a program called MatLab. These models are the optimal foraging model, mate choice, and the group movement. MatLab itself is a computer program that allows one to program different models using physics and statistics.
MatLab introduction video
Question:
What parameters would cause these animals to form many small groups?
Number of Leaders: 3
Momentum: 0.0001
PreferredVelocity: 1
NumberRandom: 0
a: 1
b: 2
c: 3
d: 4
Parameters
MatLab animal group movement simulation ran by me in Dr. Viscido's Lab.
The 'a', 'b', 'c' and, 'd' values are all components of an equation from a paper entitled "Individual differences make a difference in the trajectories of simulated schools of fish" By William L. Romey. Link to full paper below
This is a visual representation of the values that were entered. These values compute into attraction and repulsion at different distances (in this case, the distance is body lengths). The blue line represents these values a=2, b=1, c=3, d=1, while the red line represents a=2, b=4, c=2.5, d=4. The black line represents the values that were entered by the user (in this case, the values listed above as entered by me.) When the graph falls below zero this indicates that the animals will repel each other. When the graph is above zero, the animals will be attracted to each other.
This particular graph lets us know that the animals will repel each other at about two body lengths, become attracted to one another at three or four body lengths, and as they exceed about six body lengths they will neither attract or repel one another.
Analyzing Experimental Output
click graphs to enlarge
STATISTICAL SOFTWARE
As I have previously stated, I have logged many hours running many animal behaviors based computer models using a program called MatLab. There are some cases where output comes out in the form of data in an Excel software. So one must manipulate it to create graphs to compare the data. This occurs in the Mate choice model.
I asked the question, "Which female type would be the most successful in mating?"(most successful meaning producing the most offspring).
​
After running the simulation using all three female types, I was given this data. I copied the values I needed and produced my own graphs with errors bars displaying the standard deviations.
