Aaron Sandel

The Signature Course (UGS 302 and 303) introduces first-year students to the university’s academic community through the exploration of new interests. The Signature Course is your opportunity to engage in college-level thinking and learning.

This course focuses on the study of primate behavior and the methods by which animal behavior is observed and documented.  Students will learn how to conduct library research, formulate hypotheses and predictions, devise research projects to test these predictions, collect and analyze data, and write comprehensive research reports describing these results.

1 lecture hour and 3 lab hours per week.

This course will introduce you to the major issues in primate conservation. What are primates and why do they matter? What are the threats facing primates and the ecosystems in which they live?What are the strategies to combat those threats, and how can you as a student at UT Austin make a difference?

What does it mean to be an adult? In the United States, this has become a pressing issue as many young adults seem to be stuck in adolescence. Now there are self help books for parents, including “Getting to 30: A Parent's Guide to the 20-Something Years.” But humans are not the only animal to take a long time to grow up. Primates, especially apes, exhibit long periods of immaturity. This course will discuss primate development, focusing on biological and social definitions of adolescence and adulthood. How has natural selection shaped human and primate development?

The focus of this course will be on “life history theory,” which pertains to the traits related to growth and reproduction, life and death. At what age and size do animals start reproducing? How many offspring do different species tend to have at one time? Why do primates, compared to other mammals, tend to live long and reproduce slowly? How is energy devoted to growth vs. reproduction over the course of individual’s life?

Through lecture and close readings of scientific articles, students will learn about parent-offspring conflict, mating strategies, mammalian patterns of growth, and the methods use to study growth and development. We will grapple with some questions that are difficult to answer. What is adulthood, what are the adaptive reasons for delaying it, and why is it sometimes so hard to “adult”?

It's sort of like Richard Linklater's Boyhood meets Disney's Chimpanzee.

Do you want to be the next Jane Goodall? This is the course for you.

Course Description

This course focuses on the study of primate behavior and the methods by which animal behavior is observed and documented. You will learn how to formulate hypotheses and predictions, devise research projects designed to test these predictions, collect data, and write comprehensive scientific research reports describing your results. You will gain familiarity with some widely-used technologies that facilitate wildlife studies (social network analysis, GPS mapping, visualization of spatial data).

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