May 20, 2022
09:00 to 11:30

Rather than giving my Vertebrate Biology students a conventional written final exam, I decided to do something more adventurous: have them participate in a BioBlitz on campus so I could assess their knowledge of local wildlife and identification techniques. For anyone not familiar with the term, a BioBlitz is an effort to document biodiversity in a given location during a certain period of time. While the structure of these events can vary, the idea is to identify as many species as possible in the time you are given.

For this event, I allowed the students to form teams. They would be competing against one another, and also against me. I allowed them to use any materials they wanted to use – field guides, iNaturalist, etc., in order to make identifications. I, on the other hand, would only be able to count species that I could identify without any identification guides. This was actually a win/win situation for me . . . if I found the most species, YAY, I WIN! But if any of the teams find more species that I do, that means I taught them well, so again, I WIN! 🙂 Plus, I had a big bag of prizes from the dollar store, enough prizes for everyone, although the “grand prize” winning teams had first pick. There were two ways to win: to identify the highest number of vertebrates (which is how the grades would be determined), and a runner-up prize for the team that found the highest number of species across all taxonomic groups.

One of the nine teams did identify more vertebrates species than I did, and another identified more organisms than I did across all groups, a result that I was pleased with. I think the top count of vertebrates was 32 species (identified in a period of 90 minutes). I found 30 in that time. 🙂

To see a complete list of sightings (my own, and the ones reported by my students), see the post over on Edge of the Map here: https://www.edge-of-the-map.com/2022/05/20/vertebrate-biology-bioblitz/.