Part B - Background on Putting Together A Time Budget

Research Question: What does the sea lion or sea gull do during its stay at Race Rocks?

Purpose: By the end of this lab, you will have a quantitative table that gives the percentage of time the animal spends engaged in each form of behaviour.

Materials:
You and your partner will need the following:

• Pen and paper
• Watch
• Computer
• Chart with behaviours listed

Data Collection Information

The data collected during this half hour observation period will be used to compile a time budget.  Your teacher will pick a time during the day for you to observe your chosen animal. This will most likely be at the same time as when you compiled your list of behaviours (ethogram). Note information about each animal you observe in the chart (name, gender, adult, juvenile etc.). Try to observe either all males or all females. This may be easier to do in some animal species like elephant seals (where it is easy to identify gender) than it will be for gulls. Simply try and be as specific as possible.

Procedure

1. Partner A will start the clock at the beginning of your six minute observation period.
2. Partner B will watch the animal through the camera and identify the behaviour, saying the code for each behaviour out loud.
3. Partner A will record the behaviour code and times. By the end of six minutes you will have a long list of times and codes.
4. You can change up partners' roles after each observation.
5. Observe your animal for six (6) minutes and then move to another animal. You should observe 5 animals, for a total time of one half hour.
6. If you see a behaviour that was not listed in your ethogram, take note and include it in the evaluation section of your lab write-up.

NOTE: Do not change the animal that you are observing. It will be tempting to shift to the individual that is most active at any given time, but this practice would skew the resulting time budget in the direction of that behaviour. If the animal goes underwater, record that information and start observing a new animal.

7. When your observation period is over, organise all the times for each activity together and then add them up to get a total for the time the animal(s) spent engaged in each particular activity.
8. Take the total time for each activity and divide it by the total amount of time you spent observing and then multiply that number by 100.

   For example: In a 1/2 hour period (30 minutes) during which time you observed 5 different individual, 6 minutes total was spent eating.

   Therefore, the total amount of time spent eating was:

    (6/30) x 100 = 20%

   This data, converted to percentage values will form your time budget.

9. Put your data into your table. The total of all the percentages should equal 100%.
10. Once you have completed your chart, go back to the introduction page.