Week 3 Reflection

This week, Safina's work was initially really intimidating to me because I felt as though I would be overwhelmed with information. However, it was much more enjoyable than I had imagined. Safina allowed me to have a better understanding of orca whales, and the various different kinds. Safina challenged me to think of orca's not as a scary whale that sometimes gets put into a Seaworld and shift it to appreciating the differences and similarities whales have. Whether this is physical, vocal, or social, the differences that each whale holds should be deeply valued and not seen as scary. As my perspective on animal life has been shifting as we get further into the course, I have found that it's important to have great respect and put immense value on animal lives across the globe. As we approach aspects of the class that require us to pick what we want to discuss, I have found it extremely difficult because (I am not going to lie) I have not thought a single bit about what animal I want to do. On a good note, however, I have decided that I either want to research an animal's communication or emotional being. I have thought about doing my research on a dog because they have such unique relations with humans from their domestication, but I kind of want to do an animal that might go under the radar a bit more. I think maybe I want to do kangaroos because of their relationship with their children. I am still not certain what I want to do, but I am glad that I have started to at least think about it. Trying to figure this out as well as completing some different things has been super frustrating this week because I have been feeling super overwhelmed and stressed. I felt like I was getting to know referenced people a little bit better and conducting productive research on them, not just doing it to do it. Someone that I thought was super interesting to learn about this week is Jason Bruck. I thought that his work might be super helpful because Bruck studied social behaviors and memories of dolphins. Decades-long social memory in bottlenose dolphins is the piece Bruck did discussing social structures and relationships created by dolphins. With this, I was also able to find the word transients having to do with how animals behaved, and I figured this could be helpful in describing relationships or how animals communicate. So far, I have been able to conduct research on twitter using articles and journal entries, GOOGLE, and GOOGLE Scholar. By far the best source was the Safina work because it not only used Bruck's findings to tie into how other animals interacted in comparison, but it also explained really interesting relations and social structuring. This week was definitely helpful but also very stressful. Glad I am getting my topic sorted out!