biol2204 laboratory (orientation) guidelaboratory component of biol2204 zoology. images sourced from...
TRANSCRIPT
BIOL2204 Laboratory Classes
(Orientation) Guide
This document prepared by
Peter Brice
in collaboration with
Sara Tromp
David Booth
and
Louise Kuchel
Start Here
An Interactive Guide to Background Material for the
Laboratory Component of BIOL2204 Zoology
Images sourced from the
course text,
Hickman et al. 2011
Integrated Principles of
Zoology
15th
ed. McGraw Hill
Unless otherwise
acknowledged
Instead of giving you background and laboratory exercises in one
hardcopy document to carry around the labs, last year we
decided to put all the background material into an interactive document on your computers. You will still get some hard copy
notes for the pracs, but those will relate to specific exercises
only. The background material is now in this document. It is
important to realise that this is not a substitute for laboratory material. Not everything covered in labs is covered here, and
that’s deliberate. We want you to discover things in labs from the material presented there. But this stuff might help you tie
the mass of material presented in “Zoology”
together.
This document is a combination of text and graphics to illustrate basic concepts and taxa (groups of animals) that you will
need to grasp as you go through the course. The text is colour coded. Text in this blue colour is material to note especially:
the really important stuff!
The text in this green colour is explanatory material, stuff you
may (or may not) find interesting, stuff that adds perspective or
completes the picture.
If you choose, you may read this as you would any other pdf, beginning to end or bits at a time. However, this guide is
designed to be more interactive than that. There are links (underlined light blue text) that help you navigate to bits you need,
particular taxa or particular concepts, when you need them. As well as the internal links within and around this document,
there are numerous links to material on the internet that may (or may not) help! To see these links most easily, the pdf is best
viewed in ‘Zoom to Page Level’
view.
Whatever the case, enjoy exploring!
Except the photos I took!
BIOL2204 Lab (Orientation) Guide
Google Scholar
Glossary
Finally, bear in mind, this is only the
second
year of the new approach,
it’s all still
a bit of an experiment. Tell us what you like, and what you
don’t, what you might like if you were doing this in the future and so on
… but be nice, we’re stressed out too!
Phylogenetic
Framework
Adaptation
Framework
Time Spans
UQ Library
UQ School of Biol Sc
Phylogenetic
Tree
Critical
concepts
Welcome to the laboratory component of BIOL2204 zoology. The scope of
the course and the attached labs is broad, and therefore daunting. Consider
the number of animals around to study. There are millions of species. In fact,
no‐one really knows how many millions, but rest assured it is millions! Of
course, the similar species are grouped into genera, similar genera into
families and so on. This does make it easier, but still. Some thirty or so phyla
are recognised currently, and it is still quite a challenge to cover even a
subset of these adequately in just a few three hour pracs. Or so we have
found! Last year we tried
something a little different, to help you and us
come to grips with it all.
This document is a companion to that
new
approach.
One key to getting your head around the huge diversity of animals you’ll encounter is to have a
number of conceptual frameworks. If you can see where animals fit into these, then you can start to
make sense of all the similarities and all the differences between them. We suggest a couple of
frameworks that we find useful, though there are others. Have a look at the Phylogenetic
Framework, first, then the Adaptation Framework.
One concept I think is really hard to get your head around is
the time scale of evolution. Check out our way of
conceptualising the huge time spans involved. We think it
will help demonstrate how easily biological diversity arose.
As such, perhaps it is a third conceptual framework to use.
What else is in this document? Well, there’s a link to the library,
to the School, to Google (although be careful with the veracity of
on‐line material), Google Scholar and a link to an on‐line glossary.
We strongly encourage further enquiry by students (through
reading academic journals in preference to unreviewed stuff on
the internet!). We’d rather students basically teach themselves
than we teach them.
Why?
What we try to do is make students
aware of the material and try to provide frameworks and guides
to making sense of it all. So this document is an attempt to guide
you through the material, hopefully while you teach yourselves.
Having looked at the frameworks, explore the other
links around. There are links to the different phyla
(through the phylogenetic tree) and different classes
within those phyla. These should provide some of the
essential characteristics of the animals in summary, as
well as other material to help orient you.
As well, there are some links to some of the critical concepts we will
introduce as you explore the animals.
Some of these are essential to a
comprehensive understanding of zoology, so we’ll try to introduce as
many as possible as we go.
Peter Brice: School of Biological Sciences,
University of Queensland
Time Spans (1 of 4)
One of the difficulties, I find, in understanding evolution and evolutionary processes is in getting your head around the
mind bogglingly large periods involved. You can bandy terms like
“millions of years ago”
around as much as you like,
but it is incredibly hard to conceptualise these quantities in a
meaningful way; just how large a million or a billion is
escapes many people. For evolutionary time there are a number of
analogies, many of which involve phrases like “if all
evolutionary time was a day then …”
All well and good, but they don’t do it for me. I’ll work through a scheme that
helps me put evolutionary time into perspective.
To start, assume that you are sitting next to a lab bench in the
Goddard building. Get a metre rule with millimetre
subdivisions
and place it on the bench, preferably orientated with the scale
increasing towards the north west, along the long axis of the
building (though it doesn’t really matter, you’ll get it anyway).
Zero millimetres
on the scale is now, 2011 at the time of writing.
One millimetre
represents one year back in time. So many
students who are in their early twenties, let’s call you “Gen Y”,
were born between two and about two and a half centimetres
back along our scale. Their parents, “Gen X”, possibly another
two to three centimetres
further back. Federation (of the
Australian states) was 1901, 110 years ago or 11 cm on our scale.
Capt. Cook set foot in Botany Bay 241 years ago, nearly a quarter
of a metre along our scale.
For the next bit, I’m going to betray my Anglocentric view of the
world, so I apologise to the many of you who are from different
cultures. (I should find out about significant events in these other
cultures!). Go one metre along the scale and you get to the last
time Anglo‐Saxons ruled parts of the British Isles in our (whoops,
their) own right, pre‐Norman England! Two metres (2000 years)
gets you to the ancient world which at the time was ruled in the
west by the Romans who were near the zenith of the power. A
further ten metres, which is about where I am standing in the
photograph, gets
you to the time when plants and animals were
first domesticated by humankind. That is all human civilisation, in
the classic meaning of the word, occurred in the last 12 m of our
scale. Babylonians, Ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans; all of
them. In fact most of what we know of all of these occurred in
the last three or four metres. (Just in case you’re worried,
civilisation comes from Greek roots and classically refers to
aggregation of human kind in permanent settlements ‐
cities. The
words “city”
and “civilisation”
have the same roots. Of course,
any implication that “civilised humanity”
is intrinsically more
valuable than hunter gatherers is self‐evidently false). Back in
Australia, if indigenous people have been here 40,000 years, the
figure often cited, that’s 40 m on our scale. By now, the scale has
probably reached an adjoining lab!
next
Skip to Geologic Time ScaleBack to Orientation
Guide (main page)
Photo Anthony O’Toole
Cranial Kinesis
Critical Concepts
Back to Orientation Guide
(Main page)
Metamerism (Segmentation) and
Tagmosis
Endosymbiosis
Amniote Skull
Fenestration and
Emargination
Nomenclature (Don’t ever get this
wrong!)
Ecdysis
Phylogenetic Tree
Vertebrate
Locomotion
Keratinisation
Paedomorphosis
Vertebrate Respiration
Vertebrate Circulation
Vertebrate Hearts
Tetrapod
Teeth
Anatomy of a Vertebra
Coelom formation
and “types”
Spiral and Radial Cleavage in
Protostomes and Deuterostomes
Correlation of coelom
with cleavage
Metamorphosis
Amniotic Egg
Vertebrate Skull and Jaws
Tissue Origins
Useful terminology
for evolutionary
discussion
Phylogenetic
Tree
Amoebozoa
Nucleariid amoebas
Fungi
Ichthyosporea
Choanoflagellates
Porifera
Placozoa
Cnidaria
Ctenophora
Acoelomorpha
Platyhelminthes
Mesozoa
Nemertea
Gnathostomulida
Micrognathozoa
Rotifera
Acanthocephala
Cycliophora
Gastrotricha
Entoproctoa
Ectoprocta
Brachiopoda
Phoronida
Mollusca
Annelida
Echiura
Sipuncula
Nematoda
Nematomorpha
Kinorhyncha
Priapulida
Loricifera
Onychophora
Tardigrada
Arthropoda
Chaetognatha
Echinodermata
Hemichordata
Chordata
Deuterostomia
Ecdyso zo aLophotrochozoa
Protostomia
Triploblastic Bilateria
META
ZOA
Opi sthoko nta
?
?
?
?
?
Blastula
Diploblasty
Triploblasty
Spiral
cleavage
Cuticle
molts
Radial
cleavage
Overview
Back to Orientation Guide (main page)
Phylogenetic Framework
Classification of Animals
Links to Critical Concepts
University of
California Museum
of Paleontology has
a great interactive
phylogeny with
multiple links to
various taxa
Need to identify an Aussie aquatic invertebrate?Here’s one resource to get you started.
Need to identify an Aussie insect, arachnid or similar? Here’s a start for those.