8.1: Behaviors

Question 1

How do behaviours in animals arise? (2)

Answer 1

• Animal behaviour are innate, genetically hardwired
  or learned through experience
• Behaviour is shaped by natural selection as they increase an organism’s fitness

Question 2

What are the purposes for behaviour? (3)

Answer 2

• finding food (foraging)
• wooing mates
• fighting of rivals (competitors)
  Essentially survival and reproduction

Question 3

In the 1970s, scientists won the Nobel Peace Prize in Physiology for their discoveries concerning organization and elicitation of ___ and ____ behaviour patterns. These studies developed the discipline of ______.

Answer 3

• individual and social

- ethology

Question 4

What is ethology?

Answer 4

• The study of how evolutionary processes shape inherited behaviours and the ways that animals respond to specific stimuli

Question 5

What is the definition of behaviour?

Answer 5

• an animal’s response to a stimulus (internal or external)

Question 6

What is behaviour influenced by? What does it allow for? (3)

Answer 6

• nature vs nurture (genetic and environmental factors)
• allows for survival and reproduction
  —> subject to natural selection

Question 7

What is the definition of proximate cause?

Answer 7

• how a behaviour occurs, or how it is modified

Question 8

What questions can you ask yourself to determine a proximate cause? (3)

Answer 8

1. what was the stimulus to cause the behaviour?
2. how does the nurture component affect behaviour?
   - how do the experiences during growth and development influence the response?

Question 9

What is the definition of an ultimate cause?

Answer 9

• why a behaviour occurs (in context of natural selection]

Question 10

What are questions you can ask yourself to determine the ultimate cause? (3)

Answer 10

1. How does the behaviour help the animal survive and reproduce?
2. How does the nature component affect behaviour?
   - what is the evolutionary basis of the behaviour?

Question 11

Practice: zebras put themselves at risk to drink water at a watering hole. Some zebras may stay off to the side while the others drink. If one of them makes a warning call, the zebras at the watering hole will run away. Determine the proximate and ultimate cause.

Answer 11

Proximate: the warning call triggers the zebra to run away from the watering hole

Ultimate: running away when hearing the call increases their chance of survival

Question 12

Behaviours can either be ____ or ____

Answer 12

• innate (in born)

- learned

Question 13

What is an innate behaviour? (3)

Answer 13

• developmentally fixed
• Hereditary, born behaviors, do not need to learn them; instinctive
• experience during growth has no obvious effect

Question 14

What is a learned behaviour? What does it result in?(3)

Answer 14

• Depend on environmental Influence
• Experiences Do affect these behaviors
• High variation in a population.

Question 15

Behaviours can lean one way more, but many behaviours have both components of?

Answer 15

Innate and learned

Question 16

What is meant by the phrase “nature vs nurture?”

Answer 16

• nature refers to the genetic makeup of an organism

- nurture refers to how the organism was raised and the experiences that affected it