Briefly describe the data you started out with, where they came from, and how were they collected. Your background reading should provide you with the relevant information.

MY RESEARCH QUESTION:

My research question is to examine whether shark bites are more prevalent in male or female dolphins. Furthermore, I want to look at the effect age has on shark bites for both males and females. Ultimately, I want to come to a conclusion on what age and sex of a dolphin is most likely to be attacked by a shark and find reasons why this may be. My predictor variables would be age and sex, with the response variable being the prevalence of shark bites. To best visualize results, two separate histograms (one for males and one for females) should be used. The X-axis of each histogram should be different age bins, and the y-axis would be the number of shark bites that each age bracket of different gender dolphins experiences.

Assignment details:

For this project, you will be given a dataset from the Shark Bay Dolphin Project’s long-term study on bottlenose dolphins in Western Australia. You will use basic programming tools to explore the data, design a research question, and generate a visualization of the data. You will need to do some background research (with primary literature) in order to put the research question(s) in context and interpret the results. Your final report will be written up like a short study in 5-7 pages (~1500-2000 words) including sections for 1) Introduction, 2) Methods, 3) Results, and 4) Discussion along with an appropriate figure(s), table(s) and references.

1) Introduction

Describe your research question. What is being compared? What do you expect your results might be based on your background research? Try to develop a hypothesis and prediction for your dataset. Why might the results be useful or interesting to others?

Provide background information on your research question. Assume your audience has general knowledge of biology, but may be unfamiliar with the particular research site and question.

2) Methods

Briefly describe the data you started out with, where they came from, and how were they collected. Your background reading should provide you with the relevant information.

What were the major steps in transforming these data to the end product? What would someone need to know to repeat the analysis? Assume that your R code will be made available as a supplement to your paper, so you don’t need to describe specific lines of code.

3) Results

Report the relevant numbers you calculated. You should include at least one figure with an appropriate figure legend. You may also include tables if appropriate.

4) Discussion

Here is where you’ll interpret your results. Do your results support your hypothesis and predictions? What other data could you collect or use to investigate these questions further? How can the results be generalized to other study sites/species outside of Shark Bay?

5) References

You should include at least 5 references to primary literature, and at least one reference should be from a non-Shark Bay paper. You can and should use the Deep Thinkers textbook as a starting point for background information, but you should cite the original journal articles rather than the textbook itself. Many useful references will be found on the Shark Bay Dolphin Project website www.monkeymiadolphins.org/content/publications Links to an external site.. References can be in any standard scientific format (Look at Google Scholar’s Harvard format for a good option).

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