Basic Model:

Parameters:

Sorry for starting this blog so late! This first week has been pretty productive. I took the model that I had been using and temporarily changed it (I assumed there are only two photosensitive groups instead of a continuum) and diagrammed it to look at the parameters that could possibly come up.

By doing this I realized (with Meagan's help) that there are some more questions I should ask Prof Heideman, i.e. do maturation rates for young->juvenile differ for males vs. females or for photosensitive vs. nonphotosensitive. So I am going to meet with Prof Heideman on Tuesday morning, I may even ask him if I can see the mice!

I also read about a chapter and a half of Dynamic Models in Biology; its been pretty helpful in reviewing some key concepts in modeling. I checked out a couple of other books from the library and read a little bit of the Chaos book.

Meagan taught me how to use the Routh Hurwitz criteria , a way to check for stability for steady states. So after looking at an example, I tried it on my own model (my initial 3 dimension linear ODE); I still have to multiply a large thing out, but it's almost there!

Lastly, today we had our GIS class which was very cool and different, I think this class could eventually help when I need to add my spatial component to my model.