Week 2
Observing and Recording Behavior

Download HANDOUT

General Expectations

Student pairs will observer live cricket behavior using animals they selected and set up during week 1.

Students will work in pairs to create an ethogram for their animal. Using Jwatcher (http://www.jwatcher.ucla.edu/), students will code the behavior for each staged interaction, and use Jwatcher to assess inter-observer reliability, summarize and analyze the data using sophisticated sequence analysis features available in Jwatcher.Jwatcher_logo

The JWatcher manual will be available in class or can be viewed before class. CLICK HERE

Students will produce a kinematic diagram to describe behavioral sequences.

strongly suggested reading:
Martin and Bateson "Measuring Behavior" chapter 4 - 7 (pg 56-113) This book is on reserve in the library.
or
Altmann (1974) Observational study of behavior: sampling methods. Behaviour 48:227-65.
also available in the book Foundations of Animal Behavior.

TO BE EVALUATED

Every student team will create a folder on the courses server in which they will save:
a global definitions file (*.gdf),
a focal master file (*.fmf),
a focal analysis file (*.faf),
all raw data files (*.dat),
the analyzed result files (*.cd.res),
the summary (*.rsm).
and the sequece results file (*seq.res)
and the final kinematic diagram

At the end of class every student team will complete a 1 page summary, the details of which are described at the end of the handout. This will be attached to the lab notebooks.

Every student is expected to keep their own lab notebook and not rely on the notebook of a labmate.
Lab notebooks will be evaluated!