Entomology Dissection

Reading research papers and understanding their significance is a major milestone for your development as a biologist, and this can be particularly challenging when you are learning a new discipline such as entomology. Whether you’ve done this a thousand times or this is your very first paper, each paper brings its own challenges (author’s writing style, discipline specific vocabulary, unfamiliar methods, unfamiliar visualizations of data, etc). Choose one of the attached recent research publications in entomology and write up a 1 page, single-spaced summary that answers all of the following questions:

Who:

Who conducted this study? 

What information do use to judge credibility? 

Why:

What is the hypothesis of the study? (May help to write it as a null hypothesis and an alternative hypothesis)

Why do the authors think this study is important?

Do you think this study is important?

What, if any, is the impact on human society?

How:

What is are the methods used?

In what way do these methods allow the study authors to test the hypothesis?

So what:

What are the major results?

What are the minor results of the study?

What are the broader implications of these results for entomology?

What is the next experiment you would propose to build off of these results?

There are components of this write up that have "correct" answers and other components that are opinions. Both components are important to include to get full credit on this assignment. 1 page for 12 questions = be concise! The goal is not to write a lot of words, but do write in complete sentences. If you are too brief it can be harder to understand as a reader. The goal is demonstrate your understanding. The articles change every semester so that there is not a set answer key for this assignment. You will be graded based on 1) correctness for the underlined questions and 2) completeness (i.e., answer all 12 questions).