User:Bf335/sandbox

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Making link to article with different name

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Article evaluation

I am reviewing the Wikipedia article on the brown rat.

- While reading through the article I noted no distracting content. The information is clear and concise, and the accompanying images were contributed positively to each topic. Everything in the article seemed relevant to the brown mouse, and was certainly very interesting to me.

- The article is neutral, with no biased claims.

- The section on "Audible communication" may have been a little underrepresented. The reasoning for these audible communications could possibly have been explained a little more, instead of just saying "in stressful situations." I also noticed that there are no references in this section, which leaves questions of its accountability.

- I checked some of the links, and they were all in order, and worked fine. For example, in the "Chirping" section, I checked a citation which supports the claim that "as rats age, the tendency to chirp appears to decline." I checked the article cited, and in section 4.3 of the article, which is titled "Age-related declines in tickling-induced chirping," this statement is supported. (Panksepp, J; Burgdorf, J (2003). ""Laughing" rats and the evolutionary antecedents of human joy?" (PDF). Physiology & Behavior. 79 (3): 533–47. doi:10.1016/S0031-9384(03)00159-8. PMID 12954448.). Also, there is almost always at least one citation per paragraph (except for the one I mentioned above) and often many more.

- No, not all facts are referenced. As I stated above, the section "Audible communication" is lacking any reference material. There are stated facts in this paragraph, such as "Brown rats also produce communicative noises capable of being heard by humans" or "The most commonly heard in domestic rats is bruxing, or teeth-grinding..." with no citation.

- From what I could see, there is no out of date information in this article. There are some references from a long time ago, such as from the beginning of the 20th century, but these seem to just be giving some brief background and historical information on the subject.

- The talk page shows conversations between people suggesting edits to the page. It consists of people noticing certain mistakes throughout the article, such as one who noticed the stated average length of rats was incorrect. This person politely noted the issue and gave the correct average length of the brown rat. One person who planned on creating a new section in the article about the mating cycles of rats outlined what they planned to contribute, and from what sources they got their information from.

- This article is a part of the Wikipedia Help Project. It has been rated "B" on the project's quality scale, and has been rated as "Top-importance" on the project's importance scale.

- Wikipedia discusses this topic a little differently in that it discusses the animal behaviour portion of the brown rat, but also includes many, many different other areas of study of the brown rat.

Week 5 - Possible Topics

Skylarking (birds)

- Stub article

- Nothing in the talk article. The stub does suggest some purposes of skylarking but without citation. Could add to that. Possibly expand on each of these few sentences to create full sections such as 1. Territorial (purpose?) of skylarking displays 2. Courtship of skylarking displays 3. Skylarking to avoid predation 4. which animals (birds) use skylarking... etc.

Matutinal

- Stub article.

- In the talk article it talks about how the stub is misleading. Could fix up the definition, and proceed to identify other matutinal animals.

- Go more in depth and create different sections, possibly on 1. The different matutinal animals 2. Why being matutinal is evolutionarily important (less predation in early hours? etc...)

Both are stubs with little/no talk page contributions so I don't have much info to go on yet. But I still think there is substance to these articles. What do you think?

Thank you!

I'm adding one more link for Display (zoology), because this seems like (in my limited education on the subject) a big topic in the world of animal behaviour and this article is surprisingly (to me) not very detailed. It only has one citation (one which I put there for the previous week's assignment) and people in the talk page are saying it needs a lot of work. The only thing is that I feel like this would be a very broad topic to cover. I could possibly just choose one or two features of display behaviour to contribute to the page.

TA: The first two topics sounds like promising ones, just make sure you can find enough published literature to support a significant contribution to the topic. The last topic, "Display (zoology)" is surprisingly small but there will be a lot of overlap with this topic on other pages (for example, more focused pages on specific display types) so it may be tricky to add to. It would have been nice if they had provided links to these other articles but whenever you added information on a new type of display, you would have to first check to see if another page existed that covered that topic. For that reason I would suggest avoiding this topic. Hope this helps!

Thanks so much for your feedback! It helped a lot.

Week 6 - Drafting Article

This article already has a lead section but as stated in the talk page it envokes confusion and possibly contains misleading information. User Andrew ranfurly states that "matutinal is a word in its own right." By this, he means that if you were to search the word in a dictionary, it is a word that means to be early in the morning, and not strictly a term relating to life sciences. I may plan to retitle the article to "Matutinal Behaviour" or something of the like. I feel adding "behaviour" may help here because, without it, the article literally just means "to be early in the morning" with no ecological context (the article is clearly relating the word "matutinal" to animal behaviour). Then, the article may be misleading, as Andrew ranfurly states, because it is suggesting a closesly related word to "matutinal," or "matinal" may only apply to the behaviour of bees. From the literature that Andrew ranfurly and I have found, this is not necessarily the case. It may also be miselading to include both "matutinal" and "matinal" as separate entities (both are bolder but in separate sentences) in this entry, as they both mean the same thing. They may be used in different fields as suggested, and if this is the case the difference needs to be clearer.

Overall, I plan to clarify the lead section and enhance the article further by adding a number of sections that relate to matutinal behaviours of animals. These sections will include:

1. Etymology - already included in the lead section, but I will create a section on this for organization's sake.

2. History of Research - I've noticed that some articles in ecology provide a "History of Research" section. I plan to include a brief history in hopes of sparking interest in the subject.

3. Evolutionary Purpose/Relevance - will include information such as how matutinal activity (i.e. during dawn/pre-dawn hours) is adaptive for certain species, and explain why. Subsections are as follows:

a. Matutinal Foraging Behaviours

b. Matutinal Mating Behaviours

c. Matutinal Predatory/Anti-Predatory Behaviour (I am almost sure that this will not need to be its own section, as it will be addressed in the foraging and mating sections. I will, however, include it here for the possibility I find any significant information that deserves its own section. I could also put this section first as an introduction to the idea, followed by foraging and mating behaviours).

4. Prevalence

a.      In animals - I will list a number of animals that display matutinal behaviours and explain the behaviour, its prevalence rate, and to which evolutionary purpose (explained in the previous section) they serve, among other things as they come up.

b.      In humans section? - I've come across some interesting articles that explain autonomic physiological changes that occur matutinally, but nothing yet on actual behaviour. If I do find anything on humans I will be sure to include this as it could be interesting.

5. See Also - already there, but may add a couple of relevant topics

6. References

I have completed a preliminary literature search and compiled the following relevant articles:

Matutinal behaviour

A visual representation of the "twilight" period from dawn to sunrise - when matutinal activity occurs.

A dimly lit sunrise - when animals engage in matutinal activities.

In ecology, matutinal behaviour is a term used to describe a characteristic behaviour of crepuscular animals, that is, when they are significantly active during pre-dawn or early morning hours. The variant term matinal may also be used in place of matutinal (most often seen in entomological writings). During the morning’s twilight period and shortly thereafter, these animals partake in important tasks such as scanning for mates, mating, and foraging. Matutinal behaviour is thought to be adaptive because there may be less competition between species, and sometimes even a higher prevalence of food during these hours. It may also serve as an anti-predatory adaptation by allowing animals to sit between the brink of danger that may come with nocturnal and diurnal activity.

Etymology

The etymology of the term “matutinal” is the Latin word mātūtīnus, "of or pertaining to the morning" (from Mātūta, Roman goddess of the dawn + -īnus, "-ine") + -ālis, "-al".

Adaptive Relevance

Selection pressures, such as high predatory activity or low food may require animals to change their behaviours to adapt. An animal changing the time of day at which it carries out significant tasks (e.g., mating and/or foraging) is recognized as one of these adaptive behaviours. For example, human activity, which is more predominant during daylight hours, has forced certain species (most often larger mammals) living in urban areas to shift their schedules to crepuscular ones. When observed in environments where there is little or no human activity, these same species often do not exhibit this temporal shift. It may be argued that if the goal is to avoid human activty, or any other diurnal predator's activity, a nocturnal schedule would be safer. However, many of these animals depend on sight, so a matutinal or crepuscular schedule is especially advantageous as it allows animals to both avoid predation, and have sufficient light to mate and forage.

Matutinal Mating

For certain species, commencing mating during the early morning's twilight period may be adaptive because it could reduce the risk of predation, increase the chance of finding mates, and reduce competition for mates, all of which may increase reproductive success.

A praying mantis (Mantis religiosa) blending in with its environment. To mate, they must terminate this pose and take up a more vulnerable one. They only do this during matutinal hours.

Anti-Predatory Adaptation

Animals are generally more vulnerable during copulation (e.g., praying mantis), so mating during a time when there is less predatory activity is beneficial. Some species may even take up to several hours to finish mating, which increases this vulnerability. For species that copulate for longer periods, shifting their mating schedule may additionally allow enough time for the male to completely inseminate the female (i.e., it will reduce the chance of having to escape from a predator mid-copulation). One example of a matutinal mating routine is exhibited by female tropical praying mantises (Mantis religiosa). To avoid detection from predators they use different stances to blend in with their environment. They can orient themselves to look like leaves or sticks. However, when females are ready to mate they will take up a different posture where they expose pheromone-emitting glands that attract mates, and in the process must disengage from their normal camouflaging stance. Likely to compensate for this vulnerability, females will initiate this stance only at first light when diurnal predators that are visual hunters are less active (e.g., birds and insectivorous primates).

A superb fairywren (Malurus cyaneus). This bird engages in extra-pair copulations during pre-dawn and early morning hours.

Reducing Competition

Some animals engage in matutinal searching flights to find mates early in the morning. It is thought that this is adaptive because it increases the chance of finding mates, and reduces competition for mates (i.e., by flying directly to a potential mate before it has a chance to find other mates). This is supported by the mating behaviour of certain socially monogamous birds. For example, female superb fairywrens (Malurus cyaneus), are a monogamous bird that perform extra-pair copulations during matutinal hours. One explanation for the prevalence of extra-pair copulation is that it enhances the gene pool of the species' offspring. This activity is most often seen matutinally because they: (1) can avoid being followed by their monogamous partner in the dimly-lit early morning, (2) males are more likely to be present in their territory during these hours, and (3) males are more likely to have a higher quantity of sperm in the early morning. These points may apply to how matutinal mating is adaptive in other species.

Similar behaviours have been observed in other species, such as in males of two species of dragonflies (Aeshna grandis & Aeshna viridis). They engage in matutinal searching flights each morning until they find a receptive female to mate with. A similar phenomenon is seen in male praying mantises, where they respond to the emerging light each morning by increasing flight activity.

Matutinal Foraging

Some animals exhibit increased foraging behaviour during the matutinal hours. Some examples of why this may be adaptive are: (1) it may increase predatory success and (2) competition for food may be reduced.

A blue shark (Prionace glauca). These sharks spend more time at the ocean's surface during matutinal hours - likely for predatory reasons.

Predatory Adaptation

The blue shark (Prionace glauca) is a predator that primarily hunts during the pre-dawn to dawn period. During matutinal hours, they spend more time than any other point in the day at the surface of the ocean. It is likely that they are taking advantage of the increased density of prey at the water's surface during dawn. It is also possible that, since only a thin layer at the surface of the ocean is dimly lit during this twilight period, the shark (coming up from the dark ocean depths) has vision of the prey, but the prey do not have vision of the shark, allowing the shark to sneak up on the prey, increasing predatory success.

Reducing Competition

Many bees (e.g., Ptiloglossa arizonensis, Pt. jonesi, Caupolicana, and Hemihalictus lustrans) forage matutinally. The Hemihalictus lustrans, for example, is a bee that works mutualistically with the dandellion Pyrrhopappus carolinianus during matutinal hours. Pyrrhopappus carolinianus flowers very early in the morning and Hemihalictus lustrans begins foraging at the same time. The bee tears open the dandellion's anthers just as it is flowering, which speeds up anthesis and ensures that it almost always has first claim to the dandellion's pollen.

Physiological Evidence of Adaptation

These matutinal behaviours may be induced by physiological adaptations. Robinson & Robinson reversed the day-night schedule of female tropical praying mantises (i.e., by placing them in light during the night, and in a chamber with no light during the day). After they adjusted to the schedule, the praying mantises were removed from their chambers at different times throughout the newly adjusted night period and placed in the light. Each praying mantise initiated their pheromone-emitting stance during this transition regardless of the time, which suggests that this behaviour depends solely on the transition from dark to light. The authors suggested that this was likely a physiological adaptation.

See also

Crepuscular

Vespertine

Diurnality

Nocturnality

Crypsis