About Us
In 2013, the Wild Discoveries team first met to collaborate on increasing scientific literacy amongst our students at the University of Florida and Santa Fe College. Both institutions are geographically close in Gainesville, Florida and Santa Fe College is especially unique as housing one of the world’s premiere teaching zoos. Each of us is passionate about education and understands we are faced with many unique challenges in the 21st century as the human population continues to rise, latest United Nations estimate of over 10 billion people by the year 2100. Currently, our research goals are focused on investigating new and novel teaching pedagogies not only for our students but also for you. We sincerely hope you will utilize this space to either inspire yourself or others in learning more about animal behavior and conservation.
In this website you should find many helpful tools to help you better understand animal behavior. Our mission is to provide an interactive website that will engage the public in learning more about science and the basics of animal behavior. The Wild Discoveries team major goal is to bring relevant and current information regarding animal behavior, conservation and welfare to the public forum with a primary aim of education, and as a source of inspiration for tomorrow’s leaders and scientists. Our long-term goal is to continually upgrade and update the information contained within with a major aim of creating a space to serve as a credible resource for others.
We are providing you with fully controllable web cameras that you can use to observe some of our animals housed at the University of Florida and Santa Fe College Teaching Zoo. In addition, to help you better understand how researchers evaluate animal behaviors we have provided you with a series of brief training videos, a self-test video and other materials to help you conduct your own animal behavior analysis. Please follow us on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook to be apprised of our updates.
Wild Discoveries Team
Andrew Thoron, Ph.D., M.S., B.S., A.S.Teaching and Learning Expert for Wild Discoveries Team |
Jonathan Miot, B.S.Associate Professor and Program Coordinator |
Danielle Arnold, M.S., B.S.Graduate Teaching Assistant and Co-investigator for |
Angie Adkin, M.S.Graduate Research Assistant |