Introduction -to- Ecology
A course covering population, community, and ecosystem ecology for undergraduates
This is a follow up to Writing Functions.
Measuring things using the metric system is great for us scientists, but
when you call your grandmother this weekend (you do call your
grandmother every weekend don’t you?) you’d like to tell her that you’re
taking this awesome class where you learned how to program a computer to
calculate how much dinosaurs weigh (if you phrase it like this she’ll
have something really cool to brag about to her friends), and that you
calculated the weight of a Stegosaurus (no need to scare grandma by
talking about the totally awesome, and really scary, Spinosaurus). The
problem is that your grandmother doesn’t really know what a kilogram is,
she wants to know what it weighed in pounds. So, hook your grandmother
up and write a function that converts kilograms into pounds. Use that
function along with your dinosaur mass function to estimate the weight,
in pounds, of a 12 m long Stegosaurus (12 m is about as big as they come
and we want grandma’s story to to be as wild as possible). In
Stegosauria, a has been estimated as 10.95 and b has been estimated as
2.64 (Seebacher 2001).