Adaptation+Lab+TA+tips

TA tips: by Grace Chen

1. If you are doing this lab in the Fall semesters, you can use this exercise as a practice for collecting information on internet and powerpoint presentation. If you are doing this lab in the Spring semesters, you can use this exercise as a practice for formalizing a proposal and determine types of statistics to use.

2. For the greenhouse tour, there is no need to give a lecture through the greenhouse. Let the students do their scavenge hunting and you can talk about some adaptations to 1- 2 groups at a time. Before you bring the students back to the lab, make sure that each group has found their 1 favorite adaptation which they can elaborate on later in the lab.

3. It is very important, at least to me, to address the relationship between ecology and evolution. Personally, I hate to distinguish ecological time from evolutionary time, because in my opinion, there is no clear cut and you can look at them at the same time (now). Here are some questions that you may want to ask your students to think about when they prepare their proposal/presentation. a. why does the organism need the trait? b. how did the trait evolve? c. how does this adaptation affect the interaction between this organism and its environment?

4. If you are interested or if the students ask you about the function/efficiency of ant being a biotic herbivory defense for plants, I have a 1-min video on the main computer to show this. the file name is "att46-17.mpg".The plant is a partridge pea (//Chamaecrista fasciculata//, in the Legume family), and the caterpillar (some kind of moth) is a specialist on flower buds (left to the focused flower in the center). You can see an ant removing the caterpillar from the plant, and this is a clear evidence that the ants are doing something good to the plants.