Zoology Hints?

[Syr]

Anybody have any hints for doing well in zoology? The professors and TA have obviously given us some tips on how to do well, I'm just wondering what other people have done to do well in the course.

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[twelvetigers]

Well, is there something specific that you're having trouble with? Not all zool courses are the same. I was a zool major and never actually took a course called "zoology" - the closest thing was prolly animal biology.

 

[Syr]

I guess I'm looking for more study hints for how to memorize taxonomies and groups and all that. It's feeling a little intimidating right now, to say the least. I've never taken an anatomy course before either, so the lab practicals are scaring me a bit too.

 

[turquoisewolves]

I made a lot of charts...and then just kept re-writing them over and over in order to memorize the groups and their characteristics and then you start seeing some of the relationships in the taxonomic order. Thats what I did anyway....
GOOD LUCK!

 

[twelvetigers]

What turquoise said, pretty much. Go over them, re-write them. Use a whiteboard. I did that to memorize the eons/eras/periods/epochs for evolution, too.

Another thing that helps me a lot? Mnemonics. Come up with something silly. You think it's dumb until you try it - you'll be snickering during the test because you remember the echinoderms so well, but you'd hate to tell your mother just HOW you remember so well... lol.

 

[NStarz]

My vert zoo class was very memorization based, so I used like 6 packages of note cards that semester.

 

[twelvetigers]

Oh! And for the lab pracs, bring a camera (or use your cell phone's, if it's good enough) and take pictures of stuff. Go home and label parts THAT NIGHT with Paint or whatever, or print them out and had label stuff. That's a HUGE help.

 

[la hautboiste]

Mnemonics helped me a lot with things like taxonomy and anatomy- one of my profs had a contest to come up with the most creative for the order of classification of taxonomy, and it's so silly it works well:

Dumb (Domain)
Kids (Kingdom)
Playing (Phylum)
Chess (Class)
On (Order)
Freeway (Family)
Go (Genus)
Splat (Species)

 

[Ausrural]

Write out lists and stick them on the back of your toilet door

 

[No Imagination]

If your problems are anything like my problem during parasitology - (remembering all the specific orders/genus/species), I may be able to help ya.

For me, the issue was they all seem very abstract, ie.

Cooperia oncophora
Cooperia surnabada
Nematodirus helvetianus
Bunostomum phlebotum
Oesophagostomum radiatum
Ostertagia ostertagi
Haemonchus placei (barber pole worm)
Trichostrongylus axei
Trichostrongylus colubriformis
Cooperia curticei
Bunostomum trigonocephalum
Oesophagostomum columbianum

There were two tricks that I learned to help memorize them. A) Make them mean something if you can. Instead of writing them down like I did, break them apart into there roots (they almost always have roots, certainly in the genus). So instead of writing Oesophagostomum, write it as Oeso Phago Stomum. Then you can look up the etiology, in this case, I THINK its something like Esophageal Eating Mouth. Now, sometimes those etiologies help you remember something about it, sometimes it doesn't - but it still helps.

The last thing, is SAY THEM OUT LOUD. Go someplace private if you have to, but say the damn word dozens of times, over and over again. If you just say in mentally, i find it a lot harder to recall during an exam. Then practice writing them all down, in list format a few times.

Good luck to ya!

 

[luplodw]

I couldn't have gotten through my mammalogy course learning all those names without using notecards. They are awesome because at the end of the course when you need to know them all, you still have the cards and don't have to write them all out again. This way you can separate all the ones that are giving you trouble out and focus on them. I'd associate the animal with the words... I know this is a bad example but I can't think of any others...For the american beaver (Castor canadensis) I'd think about how beavers want to go to canada to fish (they'd cast their poles haha)