Advances in Insect Ecology

EFB 796, Section 08, Spring 2009

Instructor: Dylan Parry

Mondays 1:50-2:45 PM; Illick 127

Office Hours: Tuesday 10:30-12:00 AM;

Contact Information: 109 Illick; 470-6753; dparry@esf.edu

Course Website: http://www.esf.edu/efb/parry/course_efb796.htm

Textbook: None

Goals of course/overview:

We will focus on primary literature from insect ecology (both past and present). I will take a broad approach and we will look at insect ecology in a wide variety of fields. Where possible, we will emphasize a seminal or highly cited paper in a field and pair it with recent papers in the same field of study. The object is to examine how a foundational or key paper has shaped subsequent research in a field, to look at how our knowledge has changed, and how current understanding and focus is different or similar) to that in the original paper. In some of the newer fields this will be more difficult because the state of knowledge is in flux and may be advancing rapidly.

Each student will lead a discussion on a topic of their choosing (within the structure of the class below). We will read 2 papers for each class. Guidelines for discussion leaders are below the topic sequence.

Topics from 2006

DATE	TOPIC	READING	LEADER
22 January	Introduction to class	Syllabus	Parry
29 January	Plant-Herbivore Interactions I	Feeny 1970 Kapari et al. 2006 Visser and Holleman 2001	Parry
5 February	Plant-Herbivore Interactions II:	Coley et al. 1985 Kursar_etal_2006	Parry
12 February	Insect Communities I: Herbivores	Hairston et al. 1960 Terborgh_etal_2006	Parry
19 February	No Class
26 February	Insect Communities II: Trophic cascades	Marquis and Whelan 1994 Borer et al. 2005	DiGirolomo
5 March	Population Dynamics:	Hassell_etal_1977 Schauber_etal_2004	Keith Post
12 March	NO CLASS	SPRING BREAK
19 March	NO CLASS
26 March	Behavioral Ecology:	vonFrisch_1973 Seeley_1994 Links to waggle dance clips (thanks Chris) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7ijI-g4jHg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NtegAOQpSs	Chris Rhodes
2 April	Climate Change: CO2, Global Warming (temperature, precipitation patterns, etc.) and herbivores	Parmesan_etal_1999 Percy et al 2002	Mike Slattery Bekka Brodie
9 April	Insect Biodiversity	Kremen et al. 1993 Connor_etal_2002	Brian Hoven
16 April	Insect Conservation	Ricketts_etal_2002 Panzer_1998	Michael Hough
23 April	Evolutionary Ecology: Coevolution	Ehrlich and Raven 1964 Thompson 1988 Futuyma 2000	Steve Letkowski
30 April	Evolutionary Ecology: Life-history adaptation	Roff 1986 Langellotto and Denno 2001	Paul Bryant

Weekly Participation

Your responsibilities in this class are:

• READ: For the class to be successful, you need to do the readings ahead of time.
• Develop some questions, ideas, comments on the readings
• Participate in asking and answering questions in class
• Co-lead discussion during one week (see below)

Discussion Leader

Decide how you want to run the class; a combination of review of the main features of your papers and either discussion or other activity is good.  Don’t spend all your time reviewing (presumably we have all read the papers and a quick encapsulation should be sufficient).  Use your imagination – make it interesting!

• The week before you lead discussion, provide me with your papers. It is critical that you have read your papers and selected carefully. Nothing kills discussion like a poor paper choice
• As discussion leader, you need to not only be familiar with your chosen papers, but will need to read additional references that relate to the topic.
• You may want to hand out some questions for the class to think about while they read the papers you have selected.