Power of a Snapshot Observation: Using iNaturalist To Teach Undergraduates about Ethograms in Animal Behavior

Engaging undergraduate biology majors may present challenges for educators disseminating science concepts utilizing standard lecture classroom formats. Moreover, animal behavior courses teaching ethology may often require the use of live animals, field excursions, or students having to develop projects which can be both time-consuming or require financial investment, or that may not be well-suited to the flexibility of being taught online. Therefore, developing in-class activities which allow students to use self-discovery when generating their own observational data, work in groups, and practice hands-on science may serve to ameliorate these challenges facing faculty teaching animal behavior course content. To this end, I developed a straightforward, engaging in-class activity which allowed students to scan images available on the smartphone identifier iNaturalist to generate their own ethograms (catalogs of behaviors) for local state species. Students successfully described behaviors across a variety of animal taxa, reptiles, mammals, birds, and insects when generating their own ethograms and data, and they actively discussed how this activity enabled them to further understand both ethograms and their importance to animal behavior and overall how animals behave and allocate time performing a variety of behaviors. This activity can be modified for further use in both introductory and upper-level course work in organismal biology and can incorporate data analysis, graphing, or presentation skill sets for science majors.