BIOL 297 - Topics in Biology

Credits: 3 or 4 in fall or winter; 4 in spring
Planned Offering: Fall, Winter, Spring

Spring 2013 topics:

BIOL 297A-01: Field Botany (4). An entirely outdoor course, including some strenuous hiking, in which students learn to identify vascular plants using professional “floras” of the upper Shenandoah Valley watershed The conservation biology of many of these plants is discussed focusing upon alien invasive and rare plants of the upper Chesapeake Bay watershed. With no formal lectures in the course, students work with the group to identify plants as each student accumulates an annotated reference collection (a herbarium) of plants. The class reads and discusses several professional papers dealing with conservation problems caused by alien plants and the conservation ecology of rare plants. Some strenous hiking involved. (SL) Knox.

BIOL 297B-01: Topics in Biology: Exploring the Injured Brain (4). Prerequisite(s) BIOL 111, 113 and either BIOL 220 or instructor consent. An examination of the physiological, behavioral and cellular dysfunction following injury to the central nervous system. While there are a variety of ways the central nervous system (CNS) may become damaged, this course focuses on traumatic brain injury (TBI) as the model system of brain injury. TBI is the leading cause of death and disability in young adults, thus investigation into how the brain response to injury is critical in the development of therapeutic strategies. Muir.

Winter 2013 topic:

BIOL 297: Topics in Biology: Sensory Ecology (4). Prerequisite: BIOL 111 and 113. In this course, we study the way that animals receive, process, and respond to the infinite amount of information available to them in the environment. We examine each sensory modality on multiple levels, including how the nervous system receives and processes the information, how the animal responds behaviorally to the information, and the evolutionary and ecological pressures that have shaped the different sensory modalities. We end by examining the way animals integrate information from multiple modalities to make behavioral decisions that affect their fitness. Mallory.