Integrative Biology

Pig experiment chance to share forensic knowledge with Windsor police officers

Police officers who arrive at fatal crime scenes will be better prepared to gather evidence after participating in an unusual training experiment with members of the university’s forensic sciences program.

“It’s a great learning experience for my officers,” Sgt. Doug Cowper of the Windsor Police Service’s forensic identification branch said yesterday, just before he and some of his colleagues got to the gruesome task of exhuming several dead pigs that had been buried behind the police training facility on Sandwich Street.

Singing along with traffic: highway noise forces blackbirds to change their tune, biologists find

Many animals communicate using sound to attract mates, find food, and avoid predators.

Dave Wilson, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Windsor, says that rising levels of human-generated noise have raised concern for those animals. He is a member of a team of researchers who have published a new study this week in the Journal of Experimental Biology, which shows that traffic noise causes red-winged blackbirds to alter their songs.

Student researcher learns virtue of patience during Arctic field work

Dave Yurkowski learned a great deal about Arctic ecology during his two week journey to the Canadian north this summer to study how climate change affects the behaviour of ringed seals. He also learned a lot about what’s commonly referred to as one of life’s most important virtues.

“You do have to be really patient,” the master’s student said of the time he had spend waiting for a seal to be caught in the nets he helped set. “You can be sitting there for hours. But that’s just part of field work. Once the seal gets caught in the net – that’s when the action starts.”

Biology student braves hurricanes and sharks on remote Pacific island

Roberto Sosa has been to some remote corners of Mexico on his quest to learn more about the songs of the wren, but says nothing compared to the month he spent this summer tracking the birds on an isolated jungle island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

“In my personal experience, this was one of my best field seasons in terms of data collection,” said Sosa, a PhD student in associate professor Dan Mennill’s lab in biological sciences.

Field trip gives students hands-on experience with marvel of migration

More than 200 species of birds make the annual migration from Canada to the tropics. University of Windsor students had a chance to study 47 of them this weekend when they went on a full-day field trip as part of a third-year class in ornithology.

Almost 60 students watched migratory gulls and hawks at Point Pelee National Park, documented avian biodiversity at UWindsor’s Pelee Environmental Research Centre and banded migratory birds at Holiday Beach Conservation Area. Enthusiastic students were impressed to learn about the scale of the autumnal migration through Essex County.