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Optimal Foraging in Swirl

Author(s): Mary Elizabeth McWhirt1, Emily Weigel1

Georgia Institute of Technology

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Summary:
This lesson centers around the marginal value theorem (MVT, Charnov 1976), which describes how animals should forage in patches. It serves as a pre-lab to teach MVT basics, vectors, ANOVA, and basic plotting.

Licensed under CC Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International according to these terms

Version 2.0 - published on 08 Oct 2019 doi:10.25334/2YEK-ZY02 - cite this

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    Description

    Overview: This lesson centers around the marginal value theorem (MVT, Charnov 1976), which describes how animals should forage in patches. The students will complete a lesson in R to practice using data they will collect directly as they ‘forage’ in an in-class lab. Specifically, they will practice creating vectors and tables of data to use in plotting and creating an ANOVA to compare high-, medium-, and low-density patches by their associated giving-up time (GUT) data. Students are then expected to repeat the coding steps they learned in R with example data to later test a hypothesis of their own.

     

    Learning objectives:

    1. Complete a prelab reading to familiarize themselves with the goals of the lesson and the background ecological information of optimal foraging
    1. Practice coding elements necessary to create data frames, plot, and test MVT hypotheses based on the data
    1. Apply the coding learned through swirl to their own hypothesis to answer whether different density patches lead to different GUTs

     

    Notes

    This version removes dependencies by reordering the statistics and plotting lessons. We have also added information on how/why to conduct a t-test to contrast with the ANOVA suggested as part of the lesson.

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