Essay
2 (final exam) – Bio4010 Life history theory
2005 – Autumn
When and how to submit
The essay should be submitted at the student advisory office (Room
1126 in the Biology
Building) as a paper copy not later than Monday December 05 at 15.00. Your essay
will then be registered. Be careful not to state your name anywhere on the
essay, as you should only by identified by a Candidate Number. You will be
given the Candidate Number when you submit your paper.
How to write the essay
Read the description of the themes for the essay carefully. Please
answer the questions given and discuss the topic in the detail you find
necessary. Do that within the limits of maximum 10 pages of text, with font size 12 Times or Times New Roman (or
something like it), and line spacing 1.5. In addition to the maximum 10 pages, add
a front page with only the course code (Bio4010), the title of the essay, and
room for your candidate number. Please remember to paginate. Your name
should not appear on any of the pages.
The
format of the essay is up to you – select the structure that you feel
fits the topic and your style of writing. If you feel that figures are useful,
that is fine. But all figures or tables have to fit into the main text, and
have a purpose. Be careful to refer to figures and tables in the text. The
essay can be written in Norwegian or in English.
As
always when you write a scientific text, you have to be careful to support your
statements with references to relevant literature. What you do not need to
support with references is what we can call common knowledge that is within the
?public domain?. References can be formatted in different ways – select a
form that you like but be consistent. When evaluating the essay, we will look
for clear thinking, logical arguments, and consistent writing.
The
essay should be an independent piece of work. That means that it is very well
to discuss between yourself, but the written text should be in your own style
and showing your own way of thinking. Do not ?borrow? from others without an
appropriate reference. Passing off a borrowed piece of text as your own is
cheating.
The
topics are related to what we have been discussion these last weeks, and the
literature used here is clearly helpful. But to write a good essay it is
necessary for you to find more information, using the library and different
online search options. Be critical when selecting references – the good
essays are those that have good supporting references.
Topic
for the essay
Select one of these topics (#1 or #2) for your essay.
1.
On the egg size – egg number trade off.
This is one of the central trade offs in life history theory, and is
very intensely studied. However, despite this, a number of questions still
remain to be answered. In this essay I want you to:
Explain
why this trade off is important.
Give
empirical examples of the trade off.
Discuss
why it often is difficult to detect this trade off.
1.
Is there an optimal age at maturity?
Age at maturity is often said to be the most important life history trait.
In this essay I want you to answer the main question given in the title, and in
that process I would like you to also discuss the following:
Why
is age at maturity so important?
Why
should there be only one optimal age at maturity?
What
factors influences age at maturity?
During your discussion I would like you to give empirical examples (from
the literature).