Bwanji!

In May and June of 2007, 13 undergraduate students from Northern Michigan University are taking a field course in Zambia. Most of the students are majors in the Biology department, and all of them will be doing short field studies of their own design while on the ground in Zambia. The group will be making a stop in London on the way, spending four days seeing Zambia/Africa-related British sites (Burton's tomb, Livingstone's artefacts at the Royal Geographic Society, the British Museum of Natural History, etc.) and adjusting to the time change. The course is being led by me, Dr. Alec Lindsay, a professor in the Department of Biology at NMU, and Dr. Jackie Bird - a parasitologist in our department. We have made this blog so students can hopefully post notes thoughts, pictures and discoveries to the world. This should allow classmates, teachers, family and friends to share in their insights and keep track of their travels. Not only that, but viewers of the blog can add comments to posts - please do! We would love to hear your thoughts. Zikomo!

17 April 2007

Insect Diversity and Sound Analysis

My Plan of Study:
I'm looking at studying the diversity of arthropods (insects in particular) between the areas which we will be staying, and qualitatively observing insects in general. I also hope to use digital sound recording equiptment to analyze some insect vocalizations (Orthopteroids in particular-grasshoppers & crickets).

Conc
erns:
I'm with Jessica on this one; it may be tough to find many insects in the dry season. But I'll give it a shot, use the old scientific method and see what I can come up with!

1 comment:

Jessica Kustin said...

Maybe we can collaborate on the portion of the study focusing on diversity of insects between different areas. This will be fun! -Jessica