On the first day of school, there were about 15 students in our AP Biology class, but before we started anything several students dropped the class. Now there are 9 left. I didn't no what to expect in this class, but I do know that it is not going to be easy..... The first thing we started talking about was water and its properties and the chemical context of life. Both were very interesting because I learned some things that I have learned before, but more in depth then in my previous science classes. For example polar, non polar, covalent and ionic bonds I now know way more about than I ever had. After that our class took a quiz over water and the context of life, which made me extremely nervous, but I passed. After the quiz, we talked about the importance of carbon and macromolecules. Now I learned something completely new.I learned about the chemical groups, hydroxyl, carbonyl, carboxyl, amino ,sulfhydryl, phospahte and methyl. We also talked about hydrolysis and dehaydration reaction, which is when water is either taken out or put into an enzyme.
Even though I have been in this class for a few weeks, I have learned about several things that I haven't heard about before or learned more about a subject then I have before.
This week in AP Biology we talked about animal behavior. Animal behavior is simply the scientific study of an animal's behavior. Every animal does something unique to figure out situations and to of course survive. The two main types of animal behavior is innate behavior and learned behavior. Innate behavior is something you know from day one and learned behavior is obviously something that you learn how to do, such as teaching your pet dog tricks. Other examples of animal behavior is instinct, fixed action pattern, imprinting, associative learning, trail and error, habituation, observational learning, and insight. Each one of these examples are completely different. Instinct is something an animal has on day one and does automatically. fixed action pattern is a series of patterns until complete. Trail and error is when an animal taught something and goes through trial and error ( hence the name) until they eventually catch on. Insight is when an animal is given a problem and they have to figure it out also some animals don't have insight, so they will not be able to figure situations. An animal that does have an insight is a chimpanzee. An example of a situation is when you put a chimpanzee in a room with a few boxes and a banana tied to the ceiling, the chimpanzee would eventually figure it out. Animal behavior is a very interesting thing because of the many different examples and animal can have. We started on a animal behavior lab about pill bugs in different environments and so far it has been really fun and interesting. 