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5.3: Primate Tweets

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  • Page ID
    138523

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    Close-up of a baboon yawning, showcasing its large teeth and expressive features against a plain background.
    The open-mouthed Hamadryas baboon reveals the diastema between his upper canine and front teeth. Ha, ha, ha by Rolf Dietrich Brecher is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.
    • Format: In-person or online
    • Author: Kristen Broehl
    • Time needed: 60-90 minutes

    Learning Objectives

    • Identify primate anatomy and behavior
    • Accurately describe a primate species

    Supplies Needed

    • Student worksheet and checklist

    Readings

    • Etting, Stephanie. 2019. Chapter 5: Meet the Living Primates. Explorations.

    Introduction

    For this activity, students develop a tweet from the perspective of a primate. The tweets can be in a variety of formats – some may use tweets simply to tell about their day while others use tweets to share creative content. Students have leeway with the type of tweet they write, so long as they follow the guidelines on the worksheet below, including the 280 character limit. The use of relevant images, gifs, memes, emojis, hashtags, etc. is encouraged.

    Example \(\PageIndex{1}\) by Rose Perash

    Some tweets provide life updates. This example conveys that the primate, aye-aye, has rodent-like teeth, eats grubs, and is nocturnal:

    Long night at the office! Feeling as worn down as my rodent-like teeth. Time to nab a few grubs and head to bed before sunup! #yum

    Example \(\PageIndex{2}\)

    Some tweets include variations of the “roses are red, violets are blue” poem. This tweet conveys that the primate, tarsier, is nocturnal, has long tarsals, uses clinging and leaping for locomotion, has huge eyes, and is carnivorous:

    Roses are red

    At night I’m not sleeping

    I’ve got super long tarsals

    For clinging and leaping

    Violets are blue

    My eyes make up much of my head

    I’m completely carnivorous

    So this lizard is dead

    Example \(\PageIndex{3}\)

    Some tweets recount conversations someone witnessed. This tweet conveys that the primate, gorilla, is polygynous, eats bamboo leaves, males are silverbacks, weigh around 400 pounds, and use knuckle-walking locomotion:

    Primate domestic dispute:

    Mom: You don’t need another wife

    Dad: *stares at her while eating bamboo leaf*

    Mom: You already have so many your hair is turning silver!

    Dad:….

    Mom: …

    D: …There’s 400 lbs of me, enough to go around. *Turns away*

    M: Don’t you knuckle-walk away from me!

    Steps

    • Write primate names (gorilla, chimpanzee, tarsier, ring-tailed lemur, etc) on the questionnaire sheets and then draw student names to set partners.
    • Randomly distribute the sheets to the pairs, so that partners and primates are randomly assigned.
    • Ask students to fill out the questionnaire sheet for their primate based on lecture/lab notes, textbook, and websites provided (see “For Further Exploration” below). Some traits on the sheet won’t be relevant to every primate; students can insert N/A as appropriate. Using this information, students will then create tweets, following the instructions on the activity sheet.
    • Read or display tweets, and ask other students to guess which primate it describes, or have students post their tweets on an online discussion board so other students can “reply” with their guesses.

    Review Questions

    1. What are common primate characteristics?
    2. Which kinds of traits (e.g. physical, behavioral, etc.) make it easier or more difficult to correctly identify the primate?
    3. When observing a primate at the zoo or in the wild, which characteristics do you think would be most helpful for correctly identifying the species?

    Adapting for Online Learning

    If this is an in-person lab, rank how adaptable to online learning it would be(mark in bold):

    If applicable, include tips and suggestions on how to adapt this lab for online learning: For online classes, students can complete the activity individually or in pairs, post their tweets to a discussion board in the course’s Learning Management System, and then comment on other students’ tweets with their guesses for which primate is represented.

    For Further Exploration

    This page titled 5.3: Primate Tweets is shared under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Kristen Broehl via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform.