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Campbell Biology > 51 - Animal Behavior > Flashcards

51 - Animal Behavior Flashcards

1
Q

An individual behavior is …

A

An individual behavior is an action carried out by muscles under the control of the nervous system in response to a stimulus.

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2
Q

What evolutionary process is animal behavior (in general) subject to?

A

Natural selection

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3
Q

Why does the natural selection of behavior affect anatomy?

A

Because the recognition and communication that underlie many behaviors depends on body and appearance.

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4
Q

What scientist suggested that understanding any behavior requires answering four questions?

A
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5
Q

What is the first, out of the four questions that must be answered to understand an animal behavior?

A

What stimulus causes the behavior, and physiological mechanisms mediate the response?

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6
Q

What is the second, out of the four questions that must be answered to understand an animal behavior?

A

How does the animals experiences during growth and development influrence the response?

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7
Q

What is the third, out of the four questions that must be answered to understand an animal behavior?

A

How does the behavior aid survival and reproduction?

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8
Q

What is the fourth, out of the four questions that must be answered to understand an animal behavior?

A

What is the behavior’s evolutionary history?

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9
Q

What is proximate caution ?

A

“How” a behavior occurs or is modified.

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10
Q

What is *ultimate causation *?

A

“Why” a behavior occurs in the context of natural selection

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11
Q

Which of Niko Tinbergen’s questions ask about *proximate causation *and which ask about *u**ltimate causation *?

A

Question 1 and 2 ask about proximate causation and question 3 and 4 ask about ultimate causation.

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12
Q

Behavioral ecology is defined as the study of …?

A

Behavioral ecology is defined as the study ofthe ecological and evolutionary basis for animal behavior.

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13
Q

What is a fixed action pattern?

A

A fixed action pattern is a sequence of unlearned acts directly related to a simple stimulus. Fixed action patterns are essentially unchangeable and, once initiated, usually carried out to completion.

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14
Q

What is the trigger of a fixed action pattern?

A

An external cue, called a sign stimulus, is the trigger of a fixed action pattern. An example of this could be a red object prompting the male stickleback’s aggressive behavior.

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15
Q

What is migration?

A

Migration is a regular, long-distance change in location.

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16
Q

What is a circadian clock?

A

A circadian clock is an internal mechanism that maintains a 24-hour activity rhythm or cycle.

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17
Q

What are behavioral rhythms linked to the yearly cycle of seasons called?

A

Behavioral rhythms linked to the yearly cycle of seasons are called circannual rhythms.

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18
Q

How is a signal defined?

A

A signal is a stimulus transmitted from one animal to another.

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19
Q

Animal communication is defined as …

A

…the transmission and reception of signals.

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20
Q

What are the four common modes of animal communication?

A

Visual

Chemical

Auditory

Tactile

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21
Q

What is a stimulus-response chain?

A

In a strimulus-response chain each stimulus is itself the stimulus for the next behavior.

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22
Q

What is tactile communication?

A

Touch signals

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23
Q

What is a pheromone?

A

A pheromone is a secreted or excreted chemical factor that triggers a social response in members of the same species.

Pheromones are chemicals capable of acting outside the body of the secreting individual to impact the behavior of the receiving individual.

There are alarmpheromones, food trail pheromones, sex pheromones, and many others that affect behavior or physiology.

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24
Q

What does it mean that an animal is diurnal?

A

It is active mainly in the daytime.

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25
Q

If an animal is primarily or entirely nocturnal which forms of communication is it most likely to use?

A

Auditory and chemical.

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26
Q

Innate behavior is defined as …?

A

Innate behavior is defined as behavior that is developmentally fixed, meaning that nearly all individuals in a population will exhibit virtually the same behavior, despite internal and environmental differences during development and throughout life.

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27
Q

What is a cross-fostering study?

A

An approach to discovering whatever a behavior is learned through experience. This is done by placing the young of one species in the care of adults from another species (and studying the behavior of the young).

28
Q

Name one of the most important findings of cross-fostering experiments with California mice and white-footed mice.

A

The influrence of experience on behavior can be passed on to progeny, meaning that the mice themselves exhibited (mainly) the parenting behaviors charactaristic for their foster parents.

29
Q

What is a twin study?

A

In a twin study researchers compare the behavior of identical twins raised apart with the behavior of those raised in the same household.

30
Q

How is learning defined?

A

Learning is the modification of behavior based on specific experiences.

31
Q

How is imprinting defined?

A

Imprinting is a type of behavior that includes both learned and innate components. It is the formation at specific stage in life of a long-lasting behavioral response to a particular individual or problem. Imprinting is distinguished from other types of learning by having a sensitive period.

32
Q

What is the sensitive/critical period?

A

A limited developmental phase where the type of learning known as imprinting can occur. During this period the young imprint on their parents and learn the basic behaviors of their species, while the parent learns to recognize its offspring.

33
Q

What is an imprinting stimulus?

A

An imprinting stimulus is a form of learning wherein a very young animal fixes its attention on the first object with which it has visual, auditory, or tactile experience and thereafter follows that object. In nature, the object is almost always a parent; in experiments, other animals, humans and inanimate objects have been used. Imprinting has been studied extensively only in birds, but a comparable form of learning apparently takes place among many mammals and some fishes and insects. Ducklings and chicks, which can imprint in a few hours, lose receptivity to imprinting stimuli within 30 hours of hatching.

34
Q

What is spatial learning?

A

Spatial learning is the establishment of a memory that reflects the environment’s spatial structure.

35
Q

What is a cognitive map?

A

A cognitive map is a representation, in the nervous system, of the spatial relationships between objects in an animals surroundings. Some animals use a cognitive map to guide their activity.

36
Q

What is associative learning?

A

The ability to associate one environmental feature (such as colour) with another (such as foul taste).

37
Q

What is the difference between classical and operant conditioning?

A

In classical conditioning, an arbitrary stimulus (such as the ringing of a bell) becomes associated with a particular outcome (such as food).

In operant conditioning, also known as trial-and-error learning, an animal first learns to associate one of its behaviors with a reward or a punishment and then tends to repeat or avoid that behavior.

38
Q

The associations that an animal can readily form typically reflect …

A

… relationships likely to occur in nature. Conversely, associations that can’t be formed are those unlikely to be of selective advantage in the animal’s natitive environment (in the case of a rat’s diet in the wild, for example, a harmful food is far more likely to a certain odor than to be associated with a particular sound).

39
Q

What is cognition?

A

Cognition is the process of knowing that involves awareness, reasoning, recollection and judgement.

It is noteworthy that animals as small as honeybees have been shown to be capable of distinguishing “same” from “different”, meaning that cognition is no longer a term reserved for ‘large’ mammals.

40
Q

What is problem-solving?

A

The cognitive ability of devising a method to proceed from one stage to another in the face of real or apparent obstacles.

41
Q

What is social learning?

A

Learning something by observing another doing it. The other(s) may give feedback in the form of social confirmation if the behavior is performed correctly.

42
Q

What is culture?

A

A system of information transfer through social learning or teaching that influrences the behavior of individuals in a population.

43
Q

Which can change the fastest;

a) behaviors that result from natural selection
b) behaviors that are learned

A

b) behaviors that are learned.

(This is the case because the individual does not have to die in order for a process like natural selection to modify their behavior).

44
Q

What is foraging?

A

Foraging is defined as food-obtaining behaviors. This includes not only eating, but also any activities an animal uses to search for, recognize and capture food items.

45
Q

What is the optimal foraging model?

A

The idea is that foraging is a compromise between *benefits of nutrition *and the cost of obtaining food. These costes might include the *energy expenditure *of foraging as well as *the risk of being eaten *while foraging. According to this model, natural selection should favor a foraging behavior that minimizes the cost of foraging and maximizes the benefits.

46
Q

The extent to which males and females differ in appearance is a charactaristic known as …

A

… sexual dimorphism.

47
Q

What is the certainty of paternity?

A

The degree to which the father can ‘be sure’ the offspring carries his genes. Certainty of paternity is low in species with internal fertilization and high in species with external fertilization. The higher the degree of certainty, the more likely the father is to spend time and energy caring for his offspring.

48
Q

What is intersexual selection?

A

When members of one sex choose mates on the basis of charactaristics of the other sex, such as courtship songs or claw orange coloration.

49
Q

What is intrasexual selection?

A

Intrasexual selection involves competition competition, between members of one sex, for mates.

50
Q

What is agnostic behavior?

A

An often ritualized contest that determines which competitor gains acess to a resource, such as foodor mates.

51
Q

How do scientists analyze situations where more than one mating behavior can result in succesful reproduction?

A

By applying game theory.

52
Q

What is game theory?

A

Game theory is used to evaluate alternative strategies in situations where the outcome depends on strategies of all the individuals involved.

53
Q

What is mate-choice-copying?

A

A behavior, shaped by social learning, in which individuals in a population copy the mate choice of others. Mate-choice-copying can mask genetically controlled female preferences below a certain threshold of difference.

54
Q

Can significant differences in behavior be found *within *a species?

A

Yes, but they are often less obvious than differences found* between *species.

When behavioral variation between populations of a species corresponds to variation in the environment, it may be evidence of past evolution.

55
Q

How is a selfish behavior defined?

A

A behavior that benefits the individual at the expense of others, especially competitors.

56
Q

What is the definition of altruism?

A

A behavior that reduces an animals individual fitness but increases the fitness of other individuals in the population.

57
Q

How can altruitic behavior be maintained by evolution if it does not enhance the survival and reproductive succes of the self-sacrificing individuals?

A

When parents sacrifice their own well-being to produce and aid offspring, this actually increases the fitness of the parents because the high frequency at which their offspring will survive increases the parents genetic representation in the population.

Like parents and offspring, full siblings have half their genes in common. Therefore selection might also favor helping siblings or helping parents produce more siblings.

58
Q

What are the three key variables in an act of altruism?

A
  1. The benefit to the recipient.
  2. The cost to the altruist.
  3. The coefficient of relatedness.
59
Q

How is the benefit to the recipient, of an act of altruism, defined?

A

The benefit, B, is the average number of *extra *offspring that the beneficiary of the altruistic act produces.

60
Q

How is the cost to the altruist defined?

A

The cost, C, is how many fewer offspring the altruist produces.

61
Q

How is the coefficient of relatedness defined?

A

The coefficinet of relatedness, r, equals the fraction of genes that, on average, are shared.

62
Q

What is Hamilton’s rule?

A

Hamilton’s rule states that natural selection favors altruism when the benefit to the recipient multiplied by the coefficient of relatedness exceeds the cost to the altruist- in other words, when rB > C.

63
Q

What is the form of natural selection that favors altruistic behavior by enhancing the reproductive succes of relatives called?

A

Kin selection

64
Q

Define reciprocal altruism.

A

The exchange of aid between unrelated individuals (the initial aid is motivated by the expectation of a ‘returned favor’ in the future).

65
Q

What is sociobiology?

A

Sociobiology is a field of scientific study which is based on the assumption that social behavior has resulted fromevolution and attempts to explain and examine social behavior within that context.

66
Q

What is tit-for-tat strategy/behavior?

A

When one individual treats another the same way the other treated it during their last encounter (you do something for me, I do something for you. If you won’t do something for me I won’t do something for you either):

67
Q
A

Campbell Biology (56 decks)

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