5. Social Behaviour Flashcards
Types of Social Behaviour
Social behavior in animals encompasses group living, cooperation, competition, and communication.
Group living offers benefits like improved foraging, predation reduction, and thermoregulation.
Costs include resource competition, predator exposure, and disease transmission.
Costs and Benefits of Group Living
Group living enhances foraging efficiency and predator vigilance.
Minnows demonstrate reduced foraging time with larger groups.
However, bigger groups can make individuals more visible to predators, increasing predation risk.
Optimal Group Size
Group benefits and costs vary with size.
Optimal group size maximizes advantages.
Lions illustrate larger groups’ benefits but diminishing returns beyond a point.
Dominance Interactions and Group Living
Dominance hierarchies form in stable groups, reducing conflicts.
Hierarchies allocate resource access, mitigating costs.
Baboons and crayfish exhibit stress reduction through stable hierarchies.
Conspecific Attraction
Conspecific attraction involves attraction to same-species individuals.
Used in conservation to guide recovery or monitoring.
Playback of vireo songs increased nesting success in black-capped vireos.
Individual Behaviour and Population Dynamics
Individual behaviors, e.g., boldness vs. shyness, impact populations.
Western bluebirds’ behavior influences dispersal and interactions, affecting population growth.
The Allee Effect
Allee effect: higher population density benefits individual fitness.
Enhances vigilance, reduces mating challenges.
Human-driven changes can disrupt population dynamics, causing Allee effects.
Anthropogenic Impacts on Social Behaviour
Human activities alter social behaviors in animals.
Domestication affects competitiveness and behavior.
Farmed salmon show changed aggression and antipredator responses.
