Higher Vertebrates (Mammals and Birds) Exhibit Lateralized Behaviors, Commonly Referred

Essay

Higher vertebrates (mammals and birds) exhibit lateralized behaviors, commonly referred to as “handedness.” Recently an investigator studied the coiling behavior of the Agkistrodon piscivorus leucostoma – more commonly known as the cottonmouth snake.
The cottonmouth is a venomous snake that spends much of its time in a coil, sometimes coiled in a counter-clockwise direction, other times in a clockwise direction. The investigator made many observations of coiling behavior, and calculated a “laterality index” for 30 cottonmouths. He defined the laterality index for each snake as the percentage of observations of the snake that were categorized as coils in the counterclockwise direction.
-Using your box plots , compare the distributions of laterality index formales and females. Justify your comparisons by appealing to specific aspects of thebox plots constructed in .