Posted: October 19th, 2016

One of these animals was a small primate-like animal. These animals were generally seen in the trees in large groups and were largely inactive during the day.

Scenario:

Thirty years ago NASA discovered an extrasolar planet in a habitable, goldilocks zone of the star Tau Ceti, which they called Tau Ceti e. You have been chosen, as the world’s most prominent theoretical astrobiologist and ethologist, to join a select few leading scientists to explore the planet. Your task, should you choose to accept it, is to work in tandem with your fellow scientists to explore any life forms that may exist and inhabit Tau Ceti e, and report back any and all of your findings.
NASA, of course, will not be able to know if and when you have landed, and will not know for another 11 years, as the planet is 11 light years away from Earth. Due to the vast distance separating Tau Ceti e and Earth, as well as the resulting temporal delay between communications, NASA has instructed you to conduct comprehensive studies on this Earth-like planet. Your instructions further require you to send NASA all of your resulting data in its entirety.
When you land you see a place that looks much like Earth: photosynthetic plants (mainly purple in color), vast oceans, flowing water, temperate climate, and carbon based life forms. You see a variety of flora and megafauna, huge animal-like creatures much like the ones that existed here at the end of the last ice age (think Woolly Mammoth and Saber-toothed tiger). Moreover, there were a few specific animals that caught your eye, and you found yourself mesmerized by their form and function.

Here are 3 of the most interesting animals that you came across:

1) One of these animals was a small primate-like animal. These animals were generally seen in the trees in large groups and were largely inactive during the day. They had huge eyes with cat-like pupils, purple and pink spotted coloring, long prehensile tails, and a web of extra skin spanning from their forelimbs to their hind limbs. They mostly ate a small insect-like animal and fruiting bodies. While it was unclear how many sexes there were or how they procreated, you noticed that about 1/3 of the animals were twice the size of the other 2/3 and these 1/3 often got in disputes with one another by displaying their teeth and brightly colored tails. Another day, while you were trying to study these animals at dusk, you were ambushed by several of them, both large and small. While you were never physically assaulted by this horde, you became terrified and ran away screaming.

2) The next creature that amazed you was observed in the great ocean, Panthalassa. This being was about 3 feet in length with 4 long appendages protruding from its gelatinous body. You would have completely missed it, but as your submarine got about 2 feet from it, it revealed itself among the rocks, changing colors entirely and swam away. After a while, you were able to spot these organisms with greater ease, and you were able to study their behaviours. The most conspicuous trait of this inconspicuous animal is its w-shaped eyes. Presumably, with these eyes it can detect minute changes in its environment and match it in both form and color. Large congregations of these creatures were spotted off of the coast, but they typically live solitary lives far from these mass congregations. When they are threatened without a chance of escape, these organisms will turn their skin ghostly white, display huge eye-like shapes on their body and extend their arms out in all directions. Other times, they will turn their appendages bright orange and red. A final astounding behaviour these creatures exhibit is a mesmerizing and rapidly changing light to dark contrasts, much like a strobe light. This has been seen quite often in the large congregations but has also been seen in solitary creatures when they are trying to capture prey.

3) While out for a morning walk through an area dense with foliage, you almost step on a small bird-like creature whose unique characteristics intrigue you. As you investigate this bird-like creature, you discover that they were found mostly in small bushes or rooting around the forest ground, seemingly using their hooked beak to search for something underground. As you locate more of these animals, you notice that they have a mixture of fur and feathers, displaying various shades of purple, though you notice that some of the smaller animals have yellow portions of feathers on their tails and wings, the solely feathered parts of the animals. Congregating in areas of dense bush, the animals appear to live in groups primarily comprised of a larger proportion of the completely purple bird-like creatures (5-10), and a single or few of the purple and yellow animals (< 3). While studying these animals, you observe that groups found with a higher number of purple and yellow animals showed an increased display of flight, as well as signs suggesting increased fighting, as large amounts of yellow feathers are found on the grounds surrounding these groups. Upon further examination of the dense bushes that these animals call home, the purple and yellow bird-like creatures attack you. As a result, you were not able to get a clear look at the full habitat. Through your observations, you notice that around every six months, the population of these animals seems to increase and the sizes of the birds become quite varied.

You may want to start by researching analogues of these behaviours in your books and then find specific research articles through the UBC library before you begin writing. To access some articles in the UBC Library, you must use a UBC network or VPN from home. The following are useful websites for literature searches:

1) PubMed – http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?otool=icaubclib
2) Google Scholar – http://scholar.google.ca/
3) Jstor – http://www.jstor.org/
4) Web of Science – http://www.webofknowledge.com

Your paper MUST include the following aspects (grading scheme):
– Name the organism (1 pt)
– Describe the behaviour of interest and elaborate. (9 pts)
– State your hypothesis on the importance of the behaviour (5pts)
– State your hypothesis on the proximate causes of the behaviour. (5 pts)
– Describe an experiment to test one of your hypotheses and provide a conclusion about these results. (10 pts)
– Describe the selection pressures that may have contributed to the evolution of this trait – note any other animals that may have the same behaviour or similar species that may different behaviours (5 pts).
– Provide 3 to 5 references supporting your conclusion and cite them in the conclusion section of the paper. They must be from a peer-reviewed journal article and they must be relevant to your organism. They cannot be the papers that have been posted on Connect either. (4 pts)
– Create a reference page for the papers you cited. Must be in APA format. This reference page does not count towards your total page