Biological inquiry: a new course and assessment plan in response to the call to transform undergraduate biology.

We transformed our first-year curriculum in biology with a new course, Biological Inquiry, in which >50% of all incoming, first-year students enroll. The course replaced a traditional, content-driven course that relied on outdated approaches to teaching and learning. We diversified pedagogical practices by adopting guided inquiry in class and in labs, which are devoted to building authentic research skills through open-ended experiments. Students develop core biological knowledge, from the ecosystem to molecular level, and core skills through regular practice in hypothesis testing, reading primary literature, analyzing data, interpreting results, writing in disciplinary style, and working in teams. Assignments and exams require higher-order cognitive processes, and students build new knowledge and skills through investigation of real-world problems (e.g., malaria), which engages students' interest. Evidence from direct and indirect assessment has guided continuous course revision and has revealed that compared with the course it replaced, Biological Inquiry produces significant learning gains in all targeted areas. It also retains 94% of students (both BA and BS track) compared with 79% in the majors-only course it replaced. The project has had broad impact across the entire college and reflects the input of numerous constituencies and close collaboration among biology professors and students.

Females use self-referent cues to avoid mating with previous mates.

Females of many species mate repeatedly throughout their lives, often with many different males (polyandry). Females can secure genetic benefits by maximizing their diversity of mating partners, and might be expected, therefore, to forego matings with previous partners in favour of novel males. Indeed, a female preference for novel mating partners has been shown in several taxa, but the mechanism by which females distinguish between novel males and previous mates remains unknown. We show that female crickets (Gryllodes sigillatus) mark males with their own unique chemical signatures during mating, enabling females to recognize prior mates in subsequent encounters and to avoid remating with them. Because self-referent chemosensory cues provide females with a simple, but reliable mechanism of identifying individuals with whom they have mated without requiring any special cognitive ability, they may be a widespread means by which females across a broad range of animal mating systems maximize the genetic benefits of polyandry.

Polyandry promotes enhanced offspring survival in decorated crickets.

Although female multiple mating is ubiquitous in insects, its adaptive significance remains poorly understood. Benefits to multiple mating can accrue via direct material benefits, indirect genetic benefits, or both. We investigated the effects of multiple mating in the decorated cricket, Gryllodes sigillatus, by simultaneously varying the number of times that females mated and the number of different males with which they mated, measuring aspects of female fecundity and elements of offspring performance and viability. Multiple matings resulted in enhanced female fitness relative to single matings when females mated with different partners, but not when females mated repeatedly with the same male. Specifically, polyandrous females produced significantly more offspring surviving to reproductive maturity than did monogamous females mating once or mating repeatedly with the same male. These results suggest that the benefit females gain from multiple mating is influenced primarily by genetic and not material benefits.