If you don't want to fill your lab science requirement laboring over Bunsen burners and Petri dishes, you could spend two hours per week at the zoo for credit.
The gorilla observation lab is taught by Lorna Joachim, a primatologist from Los Angeles who has taught at UNM for eight years.
Students go to the Rio Grande Zoo every Sunday from 1 to 3 p.m. to observe gorilla behavior, Joachim said.
"There's two classes; the first semester, students learn how to take basic data on these kinds of animals," she said. "It's the same behavioral observational techniques that are used in developmental psych on children."
In the second semester, students have to apply their observations and code what the gorillas do for 15 minutes, Joachim said.
"Saying everything they did or do and everything that is done to them," she said "So it's continuous sampling for that long."
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Joachim said students learn how to identify primates' behaviors, attitudes and emotions.
"They learn how to take basic data (and) make up an ethogram, which is a list of behaviors," she said. "They don't have to memorize them, but they do need to recognize what happens."
Student Michelle Martinez said that when she signed up for the class, she did not expect the gorillas' behavior to be so intriguing.
"Sometimes it was like a soap opera," she said. "We had to memorize all the gorillas' names, their ages and just their activity. Certain gorillas interact differently with others."
This is the first semester Martinez has taken the class.
In the second semester, students have to write lab reports, Joachim said.
"The second semester, though, they often try to do the undergraduate symposium at UNM, and a couple of my students won that for social sciences," she said.
During the summer, students can continue studying primate behavior at a field school in Costa Rica, which was co-founded by Joachim.
Joachim said students study three types of monkeys in Costa Rica: howler, capuchin and spider.
"They usually pick a monkey they want to do a project on. Once they learn how to do it, they're there for a month. Then they'll take their own data. They also work in groups, and they present the stuff at the end and they write a paper," she said.
A portion of the tuition collected by the school goes to helping Costa Ricans go to high school.
"Our hope is that if we can get kids into college that they'll get interested in conservation issues," Joachim said.
Student Jamie Stephens said taking the class sparked her interest in the Costa Rican school.
"I want to do it this summer because it looks really good on my grad school application. It will show that I actually like to do the work and that I actually enjoy what I want to do," she said.
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