Table/Graph of Red-winged blackbirds

I felt like I had collected some really good data to indicated that Red-winged blackbird aggression was relative to the numbers of males to females present. Unless I did something wrong when I conducted an Anova, I discovered my findings were rather insignificant.

As the P-value for the sample, columns, and interactions are all large (greater than the alpha level of 0.05) the null hypotheses (that the means of observations grouped together by one factor are the same, that the means of observations grouped by the other factor are the same, and that there is no interaction between the two factors) can not be rejected. Moreover, the F values are all less than the F crit statistics suggesting that the averages are not significantly different and that there is no interaction between the two factors.

I tried this again by calculating the incidents of aggression (calls, flights, attacks) for males and females. Similarly, I am unable to reject the null hypotheses.

While, I witnessed numerous incidents of male-male aggression when male counts were higher than female counts in those areas and similarly higher incidents of female-female aggression when female counts were higher than males, overall these incidents of aggression do not appear to be significantly different.

A pattern that did emerge however in interpreting my data was that lower numbers of Red-winged blackbirds were found at higher elevations. Further, in those populations no aggression was witnessed. Higher aggression in both males and females at lower elevations may be related to nesting/predator defense and not related to the ratios of females to males.

For my assignment, I used a graph of actual number of Red-winged blackbirds relative to elevation (m). I am unable to attach it to this blog post. I feel like it is important to show the distribution of Red-winged blackbirds as in the areas with the highest densities were the highest incidents of aggression from both male and females.