Biology

Here is the assignment – please note that I will add a photo of myself from my backyard as required once the assingment is otherwise complete*
Deadline for completion is 9 pm on Friday, July 16th.
Look around your house or yard and think about all the different types of eukaryotes you live with/near every day. Chances are, you have never given much thought to the diversity you have around you. Pick a location with a decent variety of species (your house/dorm room, back yard, or a nearby park or a lake) and then find at least twelve species of eukaryotes in that one location.
Your twelve species must include at least one fungus, three plants, three chordates, and three non-chordate animals. The remaining two species can come from any of the categories.
Your submission should include:
1. A brief description of the location where you’ve found your eukaryote species, with at least one picture of yourself in the location that you’re describing. This can be added directly into your document, or submitted as a separate file. You do not need to include a picture of every species you list, although you can if you’d like, and especially if you find something cool!
2. A list of your twelve species (common names are okay, although you need to be more specific than just “tree” or “bush”, etc. See below for some tips on IDing what you find), along with a general description of where you found them / what they were doing, organizing them into the categories below. For example, under Arthropods, I might put “Small brown spiders spinning cobwebs near my back door”.
Fungi
Plantae
Bryophytes (Note: Spanish Moss (Links to an external site.) is not actually a moss! If you include this species on your list, do some research to make sure you classify it correctly.)
Ferns
Angiosperms
Gymnosperms
Animalia
Arthropods
Molluscs
Annelids
Other invertebrates
Chordates
Fish
Amphibians
Birds
Non-avian reptiles
Mammals
Other chordates
Protists (Most people probably won’t have any of these, since they’re typically only visible with a microscope, although I find dog vomit slime mold (Links to an external site.) – a unicellular protist that forms large aggregates visible to the naked eye – pretty regularly in some of the local parks.)
3. In addition to your list, we’re asking you to create a dichotomous key to your twelve species. If you haven’t used a dichotomous key before, it’s a series of questions, each with only two possible answers (often “yes”/”no”), that lead to different endpoints based on how you answer each one. You can format this as a list, or as a flowchart. Both options are illustrated below in a possible dichotomous key for identifying your Halloween candy.
1. Is it chocolate?
Yes — go to 2
No — SKITTLES
2. Does an individual packet contain a single piece or multiple pieces?
Single — go to 3
Multiple — M&MS
3. Does it contain nougat?
No — go to 4
Yes — go to 5
4. Does it contain peanuts?
No — HERSHEY’S
Yes — MR. GOODBAR
5. Does it contain caramel?
No — THREE MUSKETEERS
Yes — go to 6
6. Does it contain peanuts?
No — MILKY WAY
Yes — SNICKERS

For your dichotomous key for your twelve species, you should focus on specific traits that you’ve learned about in the materials for this module. Assume you’re giving this key to an alien biologist who understands the fundamentals of biology, but has never encountered earth organisms before (i.e. no “is this a frog?”). For example, you should avoid questions like “Is it a plant or an animal?,” since this is focusing on the classification itself, and not on the traits that determine that classification.
You should also focus on traits that are likely to be generalizable to other related species. For example, if you observed a black and yellow butterfly, asking “Is it black and yellow?” as one of your first questions is less useful than “does it have wings?” or “does it have six legs?”. (Of course, if you have two different species of butterfly on your list, then distinguishing them by color as your last question is fine.)
Dichotomous keys can be presented in text form OR as a flowchart; you do not need to do both. For ease of reading/grading, flowcharts must be typed (using the graphics functions in Word or Powerpoint), not hand-drawn.
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Tips on IDing species: You don’t need to ID everything to species level, nor do you need to provide the scientific names (although you can if you want!), but you will need to be more specific with common names than “tree”, “invertebrate”, etc. There are many apps that use AI to ID species based on pictures from your phone – PictureThis (Links to an external site.) for plants, Seek (Links to an external site.) for all organisms, etc. I can’t vouch for how accurate these apps are, but they might give you a place to start.

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