Talk:Matutinal

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment
This article is or was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Bf335. Peer reviewers: Emmadornan, Maria Dobbin.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 00:44, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

Matutinal is a word in it's own right and not just about bees and not all bees are thus anyway
This entry is more of a Wikidictionary entry than a Wikpedia one. The text of this entry implies that the word is primarily used to describe bee behaviour. This is incorrect, the word describes any activity relating to early mornings around dawn. The reference (1) used does not mention bees but has a correct definition. I can see that the entry's text is actually lifted directly from the http://englishdictionary.education/en/matutinal definition which is circular as it points back to the Wikipedia entry and even in it's own exaples there are no mentions of bees. Having searched bee behaviour references it seems to me that early morning activity is not a characteristic in most bees as they prefer to be active later in the morning once the temperature rises. There may be some bees which are active early morning but they are not in the majority and they do not define the words Matutinal and also the word Matinal which is redirected to Matutinal.Andrew ranfurly (talk) 12:23, 29 April 2017 (UTC)

Plan to improve this article
This article already has a lead section but as stated in the talk page it envokes confusion and possibly contains misleading information. User Andrew ranfurly states that "matutinal is a word in its own right." By this, he means that if you were to search the word in a dictionary, it is a word that means to be early in the morning, and not strictly a term relating to life sciences. I may plan to retitle the article to "Matutinal Behaviour" or something of the like. I feel adding "behaviour" may help here because, without it, the article literally just means "to be early in the morning" with no ecological context (the article is clearly relating the word "matutinal" to animal behaviour). Then, the article may be misleading, as Andrew ranfurly states, because it is suggesting a closesly related word to "matutinal," or "matinal" may only apply to the behaviour of bees. From the literature that Andrew ranfurly and I have found, this is not necessarily the case. It may also be miselading to include both "matutinal" and "matinal" as separate entities (both are bolder but in separate sentences) in this entry, as they both mean the same thing. They may be used in different fields as suggested, and if this is the case the difference needs to be clearer.

Overall, I plan to clarify the lead section and enhance the article further by adding a number of sections that relate to matutinal behaviours of animals. These sections will include:

1. Etymology - already included in the lead section, but I will create a section on this for organization's sake.

2. History of Research - I've noticed that some articles in ecology provide a "History of Research" section. I plan to include a brief history in hopes of sparking interest in the subject.

3. Evolutionary Purpose/Relevance - will include information such as how matutinal activity (i.e. during dawn/pre-dawn hours) is adaptive for certain species, and explain why. Subsections are as follows:

a. Matutinal Foraging Behaviours

b. Matutinal Mating Behaviours

c. Matutinal Predatory/Anti-Predatory Behaviour (I am almost sure that this will not need to be its own section, as it will be addressed in the foraging and mating sections. I will, however, include it here for the possibility I find any significant information that deserves its own section. I could also put this section first as an introduction to the idea, followed by foraging and mating behaviours).

4. Prevalence

a.      In animals - I will list a number of animals that display matutinal behaviours and explain the behaviour, its prevalence rate, and to which evolutionary purpose (explained in the previous section) they serve, among other things as they come up.

b.      In humans section? - I've come across some interesting articles that explain autonomic physiological changes that occur matutinally, but nothing yet on actual behaviour. If I do find anything on humans I will be sure to include this as it could be interesting.

5. See Also - already there, but may add a couple of relevant topics

6. References