Assignment Task I: Endocrine systems
1. Understand how the endocrine system (ES) works in tandem with the nervous system (NS) to better respond to environmental cues.
2. Understand the difference between hydrophilic and hydrophobic hormones based on where their receptors are on the cell and the type of response invoked.
3. Know the difference between tropic and direct hormones.
4. Understand the difference between negative and positive feedback.
5. Describe how your body maintains blood sugar levels (homeostasis of blood sugar) when they get too high or too low.
6. Know how the sympathetic NS interacts with the ES amplifying the signal and fully engaging an animal's fight or flight response.
Assignment Task II: Respiration
1. Understand anatomically, where multicellular organisms utilize diffusion over short distances and bulk flow over long distances.
2. Know that anywhere in the body where gas exchange occurs, will have maximized SA and work hard to maintain a gradient to facilitate diffusion.
3. Describe how differences in partial pressure drive diffusion in/out of alveoli, capillaries, and tissues.
4. Know the structure of Hemoglobin and how it facilitates the loading/unloading of O2 via cooperative binding.
5. Understand how Oxygen disassociation curves help illustrate how oxygen is loaded or unloaded and shifts in different environments.
Assignment Task III: Circulation & the Heart
1. Explain how vessels of different sizes facilitate bulk flow and diffusion.
2. Understand how the differences in the structure of veins and arteries underlies their different functions.
3. Recognize how pressures facilitate things leaving and returning into capillary beds.
4. Explain the path of blood from the body, through the heart to the lungs, back to the heart, and out to the body again.
5. Examine the connectivity of the specialized cardiac muscle cells and how they generate action potentials to synchronously pump blood through the chambers.
6. Understand how the nervous and endocrine systems control heart rate as needed and how under different circumstances blood flow to different organs will change.