On making population ecology attractive to undergraduate students
This semester I teach again at the Universidad Nacional del Comahue. This year, it is the turn of Population Ecology. I normally deliver this course every other year, alternating it with one on Behavioral Ecology. I find the contrast between both courses quite interesting. Most topics I teach in animal behaviour have a clearer theoretical background (e.g., optimal foraging theory, the marginal value theorem, local mate competition or clutch size) and there are good textbooks that allow organizing students’ work. In addition, biology students are typically fascinated by what animals are capable of doing and on how evolution has modeled behaviour. In population ecology things are less clear. For starters, there few if any updated proper textbooks. There are of course a number of books on the subject matter, but the focus is set on either the methods (best ways to estimate animal abundance, software tools, etc.), looking into specific aspects (such as population genetics), or else are