Talk:San Marcos salamander

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Wiki Education assignment: Behavioral Ecology 2022

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 30 August 2022 and 9 December 2022. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Mk.josephkim (article contribs). Peer reviewers: AnnieLiu13, Gracedekoker, Eregwustl.

— Assignment last updated by CalJS (talk) 01:29, 14 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Behavioral Ecology 2022: Peer Reviews

I added a few sentences about the diet of these salamanders. I also contributed to the conservation and behavior section (in diet), and appropriately cited all sources. Lastly, I made some grammatical changes and moved the taxonomy section to the top of the page to have a better article structure. I did a lot of work with some sentence structure re-arranging. I thought that you had pretty solid content, and you explained the details of this salamander's behavior quite well. I do agree with the comments below that some general definitions may be helpful, but overall great start. More images would have been nice as well, but I know how hard it can be to find! Gracedekoker (talk) 20:13, 18 October 2022 (UTC)Grace Dekoker Gracedekoker (talk) 04:51, 21 October 2022 (UTC)grace[reply]

Since this wikipedia page is relatively new, it makes sense that it covers more broad topics. I think once more content is added and there is more of a focus that the page will be more useful and reliable. It would be great if the behavior section was expanded to be able to divide that section into more specific headings and subsections. There are a good number of references listed, but none of them overlap in content. If more references were found for information already posted and for future posts, the writing will be more reliable.

I like that the first paragraph of the behavior section is specific for the San Marcos salamander’s behaviors to protect itself from predators. One thing that is lacking in this paragraph is definitions of the scientific terms you are using. It seems like some are general terms and some could have been pulled straight from research papers, which if that is the case is more reason for them to be defined. The terms I am referring to are ones like “site tenacity” and “behavioral plasticity”, which many people reading this article would not know without having to look it up. There is also no reference at the end of the second paragraph in the behavior section.

Overall the behavior section includes a lot of general information about San Marcos salamanders but does not point the reader to the topic that makes this organism important. Why and what about this organism makes researchers want to study it? Why does it matter?

I made a few edits for sentences with structures that needed work. I defined the term “site tenacity” in the first paragraph of the behavior section and removed the link since there was no wikipedia page with that title. I also went in and italicized some of the organism names that were not italicized. Eregwustl (talk) 22:30, 20 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]

As the last peer editor of 3, my editing was mostly constrained to catching spelling and grammatical errors, with some repetitive phrasing that could be concised down. I do have a couple of suggestions for future directions/expansions. In the Conservation section, you mention multiple extinctions. Are these from closely-related phylogenetic salamanders? Or are you referring to species found to be affected as a whole? You also state introduced species challenge the salamander's survival. Which species? This could be expanded upon into an Enemies section if there's enough material. I deleted the sentence "Their response to some predators is unknown" because it felt too vague. If you would like to expand upon this (is there a significance about the unknown predators? Type, research, etc), that could be useful. Is there a source you pulled from about the feeding behavior? For the selective cohabiting and aggression portion, are you suggesting that males are more aggressive? What mating system does this frog partake in? Why? What are some non-breeding behaviors (activity levels, seasonality, resting/locations)? You mention the salamanders are stressed at higher water temperatures. How is stress measured and quantified? Does this measure encompass behavior, and if so, is it displayed under any other contexts? AnnieLiu13 (talk) 06:15, 22 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]