Biologists Know That Bats Have Different Flight Characteristics

question 2

Essay

Biologists know that bats have different flight characteristics. Some bats exhibit fast, straight, and long flights; others are moderately slow, and highly maneuverable. The flight capabilities of bats are presumably a function of (a) the characteristics of the bat wings, and (b) the laws of physics. The data presented below are wing weights in grams for certain species of bats from Nicaragua and Costa Rica. Two categories of bat species are represented: fruit-eaters and insect-eaters. (a) Construct two dot plots that will allow you to easily compare the distributions of the wing weights for the two categories of bats, fruit-eaters and insect-eaters. (b) Write a short paragraph describing the features of the two plots; what do these plots tell you about the differences in wing weight for fruit- and insect-eaters?

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Definitions:

Symmetry

A characteristic of shapes or patterns that exhibit proportionate similarity between parts, often mirrored around a central axis.

Coefficient Of Skewness

A statistical measure that quantifies the asymmetry of a distribution around its mean, indicating if the distribution leans to the left or right.

Skewness

A measure of the asymmetry of the probability distribution of a real-valued random variable, indicating how much the distribution leans to one side of the mean.

Positively Skewed

Describes a distribution of data where the tail on the right side of the histogram is longer or fatter than the left side, indicating that the majority of the data points are clustered to the left.