BIOL 470 - Animal Senses

Units: 4
How animals use remarkable sensory abilities to communicate, navigate, and detect prey, predators and mates, including sensory systems such as echolocation, electroreception, and magnetoreception, as well as vision, smell, touch, and hearing. Discussion of research and scientific writing emphasized.

Strongly Recommended Preparation: BIOL 471.
Prerequisites: BIOL 370.
Possible Instructional Methods: On-ground.
Grading: A-F or CR/NC (student choice).
Course Typically Offered: Variable Intermittently

Student Learning Outcomes - Upon successful completion of this course students will be able to:

Illustrate how different sensory abilities and limitations adapt to selective forces and are constrained by evolutionary history;
Explain how physical stimuli travel, and how they are transduced by sensory cells into chemical responses in animals;
Illustrate how sensory stimuli are simplified and analyzed by sensory systems;
Demonstrate how sensory information is integrated by the nervous system to determine signal type/quality, size/intensity, duration, and location of stimuli;
Investigate, interpret, critique, synthesize and evaluate the scientific literature on how sensory systems work;
Demonstrate improved scientific communication skills.