Female Reproduction: Sexual Swellings, Hormones, and Mating in Wild Baboons

Female Reproduction: Sexual Swellings, Hormones, and Mating in Wild Baboons

2019

This project allowed students in BIOL 268D (Mechanisms of Animal Behavior) to explore the relationship between estrogen, female sexual swellings, and male mating success in wild baboons using data from the Amboseli Baboon Research Project. Students learned how to use the popular R packages dplyr and ggplot2 to calculate descriptive statistics about the dataset and perform data visualization to understand and explore patterns in animal mating behavior and sexual signals.

Graduate Students: Ali Galezo and Emily Levy

Course: “Mechanisms of Animal Behavior ” (BIOL 268D)

Learning Objectives

  • Increase coding skills in R
  • Increase understanding of wild animal reproduction
  • Increase science literacy skills

Course Materials