Guidelines for Assignment #1 – Fasciola hepatica Fact Sheet
1. Assignment #1 should be approximately 3 pages long. This means that your goal is to keep the
document to a 3 page max, but if you go slightly over, you will not be penalized.
2. Your document can be designed any way you want. The key is to make it an easily accessible and
visually appealing fact sheet. In this regard, a font size of 12 and 1.5 line spacing would be typical for
a document such as this. But there are no hard rules on font size and line spacing. For example, to
save space you could use a smaller font size and 1.0 line spacing for your reference list and a font size
of 12 and 1.5 line spacing for the rest of the document etc. But please note that using a very small
font so that information can be crammed into the document will not provide a “succinct” assignment.
Such an approach will lose marks in overall presentation.
3. Resources used for the fact sheet must be from the primary literature, reputable book/s or published
reports by national/international scientific working groups. Websites that are not “peer reviewed”
are typically not acceptable. One example of an exception to this for Fasciola hepatica is the Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) website, which is a credible source of information and
therefore a permitted resource. If you are unsure about the acceptability of other resources, please
check with the course director.
4. For the bibliography and in text citation of resources, all students are required to use the same style.
A specific set of guidelines in a document titled “Bibliography Guideline Document” is provided on
eClass to allow all students to achieve this.
5. The following provides a breakdown of how marks will be distributed and further details on
assignment content:
(i) Taxonomy (worth 10%)
– Up to date (valid based on the latest scientific consensus) mandatory ranks are required along
with a common name and the authority.
(ii) General morphology (worth 20%)
– Please use the image provided to generate a hand-drawn figure*. The figure must be a
labelled drawing of the animal. In a field setting, an animal biologist may only have paper
and pencil at hand to make sketches and notes on the morphology of an animal. So,
computer/tablet-assisted drawings are not permitted.
Identify and label the following structures in your hand-drawn figure:
(1) Anterior (oral) sucker (2) Mouth (3) Pharynx (4) Ventral sucker (5) Intestinal caecum
(6) Intestinal Diverticula (7) Ovary (8) Uterus (9) Eggs in uterus (10) Vitelline gland
(11) Testis (12) Mehlis’s gland (13) Cirrus
– For general morphology, a written description of the morphology of the adult animal is
required which must consider general body form and appearance as well as labelled
structures as appropriate.
(iii) Ecological information (worth 10%)
– Range and Distribution
– Abundance
– Habitat (of adult animals and developing stages)
(iv) Life-history information (worth 25%)
– In addition to a description of the life cycle, this section should include a hand-drawn figure*
of the life cycle of Fasciola hepatica. The life cycle has at least seven (7) stages that, broadly
speaking, occur across four (4) environments
– Food (should include food sources of all life-cycle stages where applicable)
(v) Relevance to humans (worth 15%)
– This section can be split into two sub-sections where one can deal with the direct medical
relevance to humans and the other can deal with indirect relevance associated with such
things as animal husbandry etc.
(vi) Bibliography (worth 10%)
– The bibliography should be in the style of the peer reviewed journal. How to do this is detailed
in the document titled “Detailed guidelines for bibliography”
(vii) Overall presentation etc. (worth 10%)
– this mark is at the discretion of the TA/marker. It is based (broadly speaking) on overall
presentation. Examples include (but are not limited to): Is the fact sheet well laid out? Does
the Fact Sheet look polished? Are figures used well and of good quality? Did the student
provide figure legends and were they informative? Grammar, spelling, progressive
development of content etc.
NOTE:
*: In biology, all figures should be stand alone. That is, a figure and figure legend together should fully
explain what a reader is looking at.
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