BIOL 4160- Vertebrate Physiology (3 credit hours)
This course uses an integrative approach to examine the principles of vertebrate physiology, with an emphasis on mammalian systems. In this course, we examine various topics including the physiology of cells and molecules, mechanisms of cell-cell communication, gastrointestinal physiology, cardiovascular physiology, respiratory physiology, and excretory systems. The large breadth of coverage of different physiological systems provides students broad training in the discipline, and prepares students for entry into postgraduate programs. The course also touches on important concepts in chemistry, physics, and mathematics as they relate to physiological systems. Students are expected to understand how different physiological systems work in a coordinated fashion to maintain organismal homeostasis.
BIOL 4161- Vertebrate Physiology Laboratory (1 credit hour)
This course is not about physiology so much as it is about the practice of physiology: asking questions about how organisms function, and answering those questions through appropriately-designed experiments. Most of the “facts” provided to students in lecture courses or in standard textbooks provide material that has been predigested and usually simplified. In this course, students learn, through direct experience, the real relationship between physiological questions, experiments designed to answer those questions, the data produced by those experiments, the analysis and presentation of the resulting data, and, finally, the “answers” to the questions.
BIOL 4170- Comparative Animal Physiology (3 credit hours)
This course (previously BIOL 4800, Special Topics) covers advanced principles of comparative animal physiology, with an emphasis on the responses of non-adapted animals to changes in the environment, and compares these responses to animals adapted to those environments. The study of animal physiology is interested in the function of animals, from the interaction of organ systems, down to the action of individual molecules. This course examines the adaptations of specific animals at different levels of biological organization allowing them to tolerate environmental extremes. Typical stressors that are covered include salinity, water limitation, hypoxia, altitude, depth, temperature extremes, exercise, and pollution. The physiological systems that are discussed include gas exchange, circulation, osmoregulation, metabolism, thermoregulation, and the endocrine, and neural control of these systems.
BIOL 7901- Seminar Course in Comparative Physiology of Salt and Water Balance (1 credit hour)
This seminar course reviews the physiology of water and salt balance in diverse groups of animals including: mammals, birds, fish, amphibians, mollusks, crustaceans, reptiles, or the process of differing physiology in developing vertebrates. We use an integrative approach to gain an understanding of osmoregulation from the level of organ systems down to the action of individual cells and molecules.