https://apps.sas.upenn.edu/caterpillar
Department of Biology BIO 1604
28 August 2022
This lecture course in Leidy 10 explores the interface of humans with their environments the world over. The emphasis is on ways that they interface, though given that this is a biology course, there is a strong emphasis on the biological side of the interface. The topic is enormous, and examples are presented through 90-minute photographic essays that are also on the course web site https://apps.sas.upenn.edu/caterpillar. The images, and the text accompanying them, are presented here for use as course material and for outside learning by anyone with access to the internet and curiosity. The course is meant to stimulate your own examination of your biotic environment and your connections with it.
See course site Canvas at https://canvas.upenn.edu/courses/1681317 for announcements, and for recordings of lectures go to https://canvas.upenn.edu/courses/1681317/external_tools/90311.
Course TA: Eeman Abbasi at eabbasi@sas.upenn.edu with office hours by appointment.
| Lectures, Fall Semester, 2025: | image menu | |
| (1) | Ants and Acacias: ecology and evolutionary biology of a mutualism - two stories: your professor, and biology | |
| (2) | The world is not colored green, but L-dopa, cocaine and caffeine. AND, biodiversity prospecting. | |
| (3) | Pleistocene anachronisms: the plants the megafauna left behind. | |
| (4) | Why do bamboos wait so long to flower? | |
| (5) | The great green solar panel | |
| (6) | First mid-semester examination, 1.5 hours (covering through 13 September included, and readings) | |
| (7) | Socioeconomics and biology of tropical timber harvest -- carbon bioeconomics | |
| (8) | Day in the life of an African hunter | |
| (9) | Mimicry: population ecology, evolution, selection, phylogeny, taxonomy, perception and inference. | |
| (10) | Short summers: arctic biology | |
| (11) | Life on a small Caribbean island | |
| (12) | Fall Break, no lecture | |
| (13) | Guest Lecturer: Professor Brent Helliker, Human and Environmental linkages revealed through stable isotope analysis | |
| (14) | BioAlfa = BioLiteracy: the Latin American viewpoint. NO SLIDES ON THE WEB, BUT THE PPT WILL BE UPLOADED TO CANVAS FOR THIS LECTURE | |
| (15) | Animals and their biotic environment: Liomys salvini mice | |
| (16) | Animals and their physical environment: beaver, Castor canadiensis | |
| (17) | Second mid-semester examination, 1.5 hours (covering 20 September through 20 October, and readings) | |
| (18) | Eeman Abbasi (eabbasi@sas.upenn.edu), your TA; why is she here? where is she going? what does she do in this biologists' guild/silo/ivory tower? | |
| (19) | Guest lecture: Professor Mecky Pohlschroder, the microbial world | |
| (20) | "Paradise Reclaimed": in class video on the start of Area de Conservacion Guanacaste, northwestern Costa Rica; read Long March and http://www.acguanacaste.ac.cr and http://www.gdfcf.org | |
| (21) | Explain old Santa Rosa movie | |
| (22) | Guest lecture: Professor Rob Pringle, Princeton, The restoration of Gorongosa National Park | |
| (23) | View from the inside: the black bear and other assorted guts. | |
| (24) | THANKSGIVING BREAK 24 November 2022; NO LECTURE | |
| (25) | Animals and their biotic environment: Rothschildia moths. | |
| (26) | What is a flower? | |
| (27) | What is a fruit and why does it rot? | |
| (28) | Restoration biology | |
| (29) | FINAL EXAM, ABOUT 100 QUESTIONS, ENTIRE COURSE AND READINGS, 6-8 PM IN LEIDY 10, 21 DECEMBER 2022 | |