Behaviour ecology 51

Question 1

Biologists analyze behaviour at the proximate and ultimate levels _____________________ and how they affect fitness.

Answer 1

the genetic and physiological mechanisms

Question 2

Individuals can behave in a wide range of ways; which behaviour occurs depends on ____________________________

Answer 2

current conditions

Question 3

Foraging patterns may vary with genotype; foraging decisions maximize ___________ and minimize _______

Answer 3

energy gain

costs

Question 4

[*] Sexual behaviour is affected by levels of sex hormones; females choose mates that provide ______________________________

Answer 4

good alleles and needed resources.

Question 5

Animals navigate using an array of cues;

name them

Answer 5

the costs of migration can be offset by benefits in food availability

Question 6

[*] Animals communicate with ___________________; communication can be honest or deceitful.

Answer 6

movements, odours, or other stimuli

Question 7

[*] Individuals that behave ___________ are usually helping relatives or individuals that help them in return.

Answer 7

altruistically

Question 8

define behaviour

Answer 8

Behaviour is action—a response to a stimulus.

Question 9

Ecology is the study of ____

Answer 9

how organisms interact with their physical and biological environments

Question 10

•behavioural biology is - what

Answer 10

the study of how organisms respond to particular stimuli from those environments. The action in behaviour is this response.

Question 11

•Behavioural ecologists ask questions and test hypotheses at two fundamental levels—

Answer 11

proximate and ultimate.

Question 12

•To understand why animals and other organisms do what they do, researchers have to ask questions about ______

Answer 12

genetics, hormonal signals, neural signalling, natural selection, evolutionary history, and ecological interactions.

Question 13

•Proximate - define

Answer 13

(or mechanistic) causation explains how actions occur.

Question 14

•Ultimate - define

Answer 14

(or evolutionary) causation explains why actions occur.

Question 15

Efforts to explain behaviour at the proximate and ultimate levels are complementary. To understand what an organism is doing, biologists want to know

Answer 15

how the behaviour happens and why

Question 16

•Fixed action patterns (FAPs) are

Answer 16

highly inflexible, stereotypical behaviour patterns.

Question 17

FAPs are examples of ______________, behaviour that is inherited and shows little variation based on learning or the individual’s condition

Answer 17

innate behaviour

Question 18

[*] Most animals have a range of actions that they can perform in response to a situation. Animals take in information from the environment and, based on that information, make decisions about what to do.
•
•This kind of behaviour is called _______________________

Answer 18

condition-dependent behaviour.

Question 19

To link condition-dependent behaviour to fitness, biologists use a framework called _________________

Answer 19

cost-benefit analysis

Question 20

–Costs and benefits are measured in terms of their impact on

Answer 20

fitness —the ability to produce offspring.

Question 21

•When animals seek food, they are _____________.

Answer 21

foraging

Question 22

•To understand why individuals eat the way they do, consider:

Answer 22

1. research on genetic variation in foraging behaviour and
2. the costs and benefits of feeding at various distances from home.

Question 23

•Fruit-fly larvae exhibit one of two behaviours during feeding.
–“Rovers” move after feeding in a particular location.
–“Sitters” stay in one location to feed.
•Experiments determined that this feeding behaviour is inherited via the ____________

Answer 23

foraging (for) gene.

Question 24

[*] When biologists set out to study why animals forage in a particular way, they usually start by assuming that individuals make decisions that maximize the amount of usable energy they take in, given the costs of finding and ingesting their food and the risk of being eaten while they’re at it.
•
•This claim is called

Answer 24

optimal foraging.

Question 25

•Sex hormones—testosterone in males and estradiol in females—are the _______________ cause of dramatic seasonal changes in behaviour.

Answer 25

proximate

Question 26

Sexual Activity in Anolis Lizards

•A series of experiments indicate that two types of stimulation are necessary to produce the hormonal changes that lead to sexual behaviour.
Females need to experience ____________________________________

Answer 26

spring-like light and temperatures, as well as exposure to breeding mates

Question 27

•Males signal females and induce estradiol release by exhibiting a________________. When males court females, they

Answer 27

specific mating signal

bob up and down and extend a brightly coloured patch of skin called a dewlap.

Question 28

•Although both male and female barn swallows help build the nest and feed the young, the species exhibits a significant amount of______________—males are slightly larger and more brightly coloured, and their outer tail feathers are about 15 percent longer than the same feathers in females.

Answer 28

sexual dimorphism

Question 29

•Experiments supported the hypothesis that female barn swallows prefer long-tailed mates.

Why?

Answer 29

–Long-tailed males are more efficient in flight and more successful in finding food, and thus have higher fitness.
He will also pass high-fitness alleles on to her offspring and be able to help her rear those offspring efficiently

•Animals usually make decisions in a way that maximizes their fitness.

Question 30

•There are many questions related to habitat selection:

list them:

Answer 30

–Should juveniles disperse from the area where they were raised?
–How large of a territory should be defended against competitors.
–How do habitat density and quality affect fitness?

Question 31

•migration — define

Answer 31

the long-distance movement of a population associated with a change of seasons—relates to these questions of habitat selection.

Question 32

Biologists distinguish three categories of navigation

list them

Answer 32

1.Piloting is the use of familiar landmarks.
●
2.Compass orientation is movement oriented in a specific direction.
●
3.True navigation is the ability to locate a specific place on Earth’s surface.

Question 33

Piloting

Answer 33

is the use of familiar landmarks.

Question 34

Compass orientation

Answer 34

is movement oriented in a specific direction.

Question 35

True navigation

Answer 35

is the ability to locate a specific place on Earth’s surface

Question 36

•a 24-hour rhythm of chemical activity. The clock is set by the light-dark transitions of day and night and tells an animal enough about the time of day that it can use the Sun’s position to find magnetic north.

Answer 36

circadian rhythm

Question 37

•At the ultimate level, why does migration exists

Answer 37

because individuals that migrate achieve higher reproductive success than individuals that do not migrate.

[*] Increased access to food is a benefit of migration. There is a high cost, however, in time, energy, and predation risk.

Question 38

what is the cost of migration?

Answer 38

high cost, however, in time, energy, and predation risk

Question 39

•Communication is a process in which_______…

Answer 39

a signal (any information-containing behaviour) from one individual modifies the behaviour of another individual.

Question 40

•Communication is a social process. For communication to occur, it is not enough that a signal is sent;

Answer 40

the signal must be received and acted on.
•

Question 41

proximate mechanism of communication of honey bees

Answer 41

Von Frisch found that both the round dance and the waggle dance communicate information about food sources

He observed bees displaying a “round dance” to workers, as well as a “waggle dance

Question 42

hoeny bees
•Recent work has shown that the round and waggle dances are actually the same type of behaviour—round dances just have a short waggle phase.
•The orientation of the waggle portion of the dance correlated ___________________________________________

_______________________________

Answer 42

with the direction of the food source from the hive, and the length of the straight waggling run was proportional to the distance the foragers had to fly to reach the food.

•This dance also communicated the position of the food relative to the current position of the Sun.

Question 43

Several modes of communication are often used together. list the four modes

Answer 43

tactile

olfactory

acoustic

visual

The type of signal an organism uses correlates with its habitat

Question 44

•Most behaviours help individuals respond to environmental stimuli such that they can maximize their own fitness. __________, behaviour that has a fitness cost to the individual exhibiting it and a fitness benefit to the recipient, appears to contradict this pattern.

Answer 44

Altruism

Question 45

Altruism

Answer 45

•
•Altruism decreases an individual’s ability to produce offspring but helps others produce more offspring.
•
•The existence of altruistic behaviour appears to be paradoxical; alleles that make an individual more likely to be altruistic should be selected against.

Question 46

•Hamilton’s rule states that altruistic behaviour is most likely when three conditions are met:

Answer 46

1. The fitness benefits of altruistic behaviour are high for the recipient.
2. The altruist and recipient are close relatives.
3. The fitness costs to the altruist are low.

Question 47

Hamiltons’s rules

What does it mean when the individuals have an r = 0?

r = 1

Answer 47

•The coefficient of relatedness, r, varies between 0.0 and 1.0.

–If two individuals have no identical alleles that were inherited from the same ancestor, then their r value is 0.0.

–Because every allele in pairs of identical twins is identical, their coefficient of relatedness is 1.0.

Question 48

•Hamilton’s rule is important because it shows that individuals can pass their alleles on to the next generation not only by having their own offspring, but also by _________________

Answer 48

helping close relatives produce more offspring.

Question 49

•_________________ display extreme forms of altruistic behaviour and kin selection. These animals live in social colonies in which only a few individuals reproduce, while the rest are sterile workers that support the colony.

Answer 49

Eusocial animals

Question 50

–In some eusocial insects a haplodiploid mechanism of sex determination leads to

Answer 50

a very high coefficient of relatedness (r).

Question 51

–Naked mole rats are _______, a colony includes 70 or 80 mostly sterile, hairless, blind rodents, with only one female who reproduces with a few related males resulting in a high r.

Answer 51

eusocial

Question 52

Direct fitness

Answer 52

–Direct fitness is derived from an individual’s own offspring.

Question 53

Indirect fitness

Answer 53

Indirect fitness is derived from helping relatives produce more offspring than they could produce on their own

Question 54

•The combination of direct and indirect fitness components is called ______________

Answer 54

inclusive fitness.

Question 55

•_________________ is natural selection that acts through benefits to relatives and results in increased indirect fitness.

Answer 55

Kin selection

Question 56

in prairie dogs

•The kin-selection hypothesis predicts

Answer 56

that individuals who do not have close genetic relatives nearby will rarely give an alarm call.

Question 57

Most cases of self-sacrificing behaviour that have been analyzed to date are consistent with _____________and are hypothesized to be the result of kin selection

Answer 57

Hamilton’s rule

Question 58

Reciprocal altruism

Answer 58

• Reciprocal altruism is an exchange of fitness benefits that are separated in time.
• Reciprocal altruism is also widely invoked as an explanation for the helpful and cooperative behaviour commonly observed among unrelated humans.

Question 59

•You should be able to
–Determine the proximate and ultimate causation of a behaviour.
–Explain how the changes in day length trigger changes in sex hormones in Anolis lizards.
–Design an experiment to determine if barn swallow tail length affects female choice of mate.
–Describe how animals find their way on migration.
–Describe how deceitful communication can be adaptive.
–Calculate the coefficient of relatedness.
–Explain how altruistic behaviour increases the fitness of individuals.

Question 60

Are plants, fungi, protits and bacteria capibible of behaviour?

give examples

Answer 60

behaviour is responce to stimulus

plants grow to the sun

stem collapsing in response to touch