BIOL3510-Digestive System Morphological Data Report Writing - Science Assignment Help

Assignment Task

Task

Scope:

One of the challenges of being a scientist is interpreting your findings. For the most part research is novel so no single paper will give you all the answers. Instead you need to become proficient at connecting ideas from several papers to provide the answer to your question.

Aim:

In this practical you will examine two possum species that inhabit urban environments in Sydney; the Ringtail possum and the Brushtail possum. The aim of this assessment is to collect digestive system morphological data from possums to enable a comparison between the possums and the rat, species with variable diets and evolutionary histories. 

In this report you should include:

1. Graphs illustrating the key differences in the size (length, width or surface area) of the digestive tract of the three species

2. Images of the digestive tract for the three species.

3. Results of statistical analyses integrated into the text description.

Statistical analyses:

There are a number of different stats tests you could employ here to explore your data. You can also use a range of stats programs. I suggest you use one you are already familiar with.

The following are some suggestions:

A. Comparison the lengths the small intestine to the hindgut for each species. Is the hindgut longer than the foregut? I suggest a paired t-test for each species.

B. Does the proportion of the total gastrointestinal tract taken up by the hindgut vary between species? I suggest a one-way ANOVA followed by post-hoc tests of pair-wise comparisons.

Discussion :

Discuss findings of your experiment in context of published material and address points below. Also draw conclusions to your question and raise any future questions that may have arisen from the study.

1. Discuss your findings relative to the hypothesis proposed by Wang et al 2003.

2. Discuss the importance of the relationship between the digestive system and diet of the mammals you have examined.

3. Provide plausible reason(s) for the observed differences in your three species. To answer this you may need to first read the review article by McDowell and Mcleod (2007) and really scrutinise the differences you see in your data.

4. At a broader scale and the evidence to support your ideas: in considering evolutionary events we must consider selective pressures that may drive morphological differences between and indeed within species. These morphological differences may be shaped by a number of selective pressures acting simultaneously and so the resulting differences maybe a result of a trade-off (or compromise). You may need to discuss concepts such as natural selection, convergent evolution, phenotypic plasticity etc.  

5. Conclusion: from your findings, and your literature research on this topic, speculate on the importance of this finding – this could range from and include issues related to evolution, invasive ecology, ecosystem ecology, management etc etc. 

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