Animal Behavior Flashcards
Why do animals move different locations?
- To disperse
- To pursue resources: food, mates, social partners
- To escape stressors: environmental, predators, parasites
What is the Darwinian Daemon?
It is the idea that something is able to optimize everything (it doesn’t exist)
What is a landscape of fear?
There are predator’s involved which makes animals disperse more
What is a landscape of disgust?
Parasites involved, animals try to avoid
What are the values in optimality currency?
- Time
- Resources
- Energy
- Effect on survival
- Effect on reproduction
What is ideal free distribution?
One area/patch might be ideal, but if everyone decides to go there then there will be too much competition, which means that they will have to disperse anyways.
What do optimality models help us predict?
- Decisions that animals choose to make
- Currency they use
- Constraints which limit the behavior
Why is optimality a poor name?
It is a bad name because everything is a compromise.
What are two important factors of memory?
- Rehearsal or practice frequency: how often you use that memory
- Retention Interval: How long since you last used the memory
What are the two types of memory?
Explicit: requires conscious awareness
Implicit: knowledge that effects experience
What are the different types of memory within explicit and implicit?
- Semantic: facts
- Episodic: first-hand experiences
- Procedural: how to do things
- Classical conditioning: aren’t conscious most of the time
- Priming: changes behavior as a result of experiences
What are the stages of memory?
- Sensory memory - immediate processing of incoming information
- Short term (STM) - from minute to minute
- Long Term (LTM) - Lengthy storage, only of selected useful things (no known limit)
What does sensory memory do?
Short-term buffer system giving the brain time to process. Iconic memory lasts about 1/4 of a second.
What does short-term memory do? (STM)
Keeps mall amounts of information for about 18-30 seconds, if info not kept active by working memory.
What is Long-term memory? (LTM)
Information for days, months and years. Very large no known limit
What are the characteristics of play?
1) Normal behavioral elements for no reason
2) Movements very exaggerated
3) Elements often repeated
4) Sequence broken in irrelevant actions
5) Failure to complete elements, which may be repeated
6) Usually carries out far more by immature animals
7) enjoyable emotional response
What are some signals in play?
- One is animals being vocal
- Another is self-handicapping (lets other animal win, puts themselves at a disadvantage)
What are some costs of play?
1) it can be really expensive in terms of energy, you might have to conserve energy to survive
2) it can be dangerous (could die during play)
What are the types of play:
Object play: play w/ any object edible or otherwise (not alive)
Locomotor play: jumping, tail chasing, running
Social play: playing with another individual, helps set up social hierarchies, develop social competence
What is one influence of play? (kind of interesting and funny)
Play can be influenced by the temperature, more play when trying to warm the body, less when its too hot
What is social learning?
How the society in which you live alters what you learn
What is Cultural transmission?
a system of information transfer that affects the individuals phenotype, in the sense that part of the phenotype is acquired from others teaching or social learning
Are animals able to socially learn?
Yes, one good example of this is the milk birds (tits), they would drink milk off of peoples poarches and this was taught by another bird. Along with this we have orcas teaching each other how to sink boats.
- Humpback feeding strategy (blow bubbles to confuse fish) and the lobtail method
Overall is social learning adaptive? (what are some maladaptive features vs. adaptive)
Maladaptive:
- traditions may persist after conditions have changed
- Traditions started by a single event might lead to suboptimal behavior
- Message may get corrupted
Adaptive:
- very fast spread of new ideas/discoveries
- Safer as only one animal needs to investigate new dangers
- Identity of predators, good food etc. can be passed on to young safely
What do you need to have effective social learning?
- a big brain
- educated demonstrator
- living demonstrator
- Social bond w/ demonstrator
What are the types of cultural transmission?
Vertical: learning from parents (bird song)
Horizontal: learning from peers, i.e. members of your own age group (dolphins)
Oblique: learning from adults other than your parents (found in complex social groups; humans are one)
What are the outcomes from social learning?
1) spread new ideas very quickly
2) Local dialects and traditions (culture?)
3) Speciation can result
What are the 5 mechanisms of social learning often mistaken for true imitation?
- Instrumental learning
- Stimulus enhancement
- Social facilitation
- Contagion
- Emulation
What can lead us to believe that something is social learning when it is not?
Poor experimentation designs can get to the wrong conclusions about experimental learning. A lot of the time it is confused with imitation.
What is Stimulus enhancement?
learning by watching others, that a particular object or area is of interest (Blue tits)
What is Social facilitation?
Carrying of an already known behavior when others in a social group are doing it too. Advantageous bc its safer
What is Contagion of observation?
Conditioning –> catches mood of demonstrator and then copies its general attitude
What is Emulation?
When an animal learns a new behavior or sequence of movements which lead to a particular goal, watching the demonstrator carry out the sequence of events. (Humans use this a lot)
What is the definition of teaching?
when the demonstrator modifies its behavior only in the presence of appropriate naive observer with some cost to itself.
What is one example of culture? in the animal kingdom:
Chimps in Africa have different colonies that do different things, like use different tools, have different calls etc.
Why don’t animals respond the same way when put in the same situation?
1) Hormones, parasites, neurophysiology, diurnal cycles
2) Animals play different strategies
3) Different personalities
What are evolutionary stable strategies (ESS)?
Strategies which cannot be invaded by another strategy
What are two different strategies when fighting?
- Run a way (dove)
- Attack (Hawk)
What is “war of attrition”?
How long you can hold out before running away.
What are different feeding behaviors (pigeons)?
There are producers and then there are scroungers.
What are ways that we can help extinction?
- Stop thinking of insects as pests
- plant things, vegetation
- understand behavior and apply your understanding
What do you do in behavioral ecology?
- Count populations - need to know how many endangered species you have
- Dealing with small populations - small populations have different behaviors and growth rates than larger ones
- Identifying and alleviating the affects of disturbance
What are the different ways we can count populations?
- Total counts
- Incomplete counts
- Indirect counts
- Capture-mark-recapture
What is a Total count?
Total counts: sometimes animals are out in the open and they can all be counted
What is an Incomplete count?
Incomplete counts: count part of the population, according to how much to how much population there is
What is an Indirect count?
count indicators of the animal (i.e. feces)
What is a Capture-mark-recapture?
capture as many as possible then release them and assume the population remixes (most used method)
Why are monogamous populations more prone to extinction?
1) Chance events make failure to breed more likely
2) females with poor quality mates don’t invest very much into that years offspring
What is aggregation?
a cluster of individuals, living in a group
How does aggregation help survival?
- fertilization more likely
- hunting/food discovery benefits
- co-operation in predator defense
- defense against environmental stress
- genetic diversity
What is the allele effect?
group size reduction leads to extinction
What is an example of the allele effect?
An example of this would be the passenger pigeons, there was a massive flock that held 3.5 billion birds (1/4 of all north American birds). But they were massively over hunted, and there environment went away. They had a reduced mating probability, reduced parental investment, increased risk of predation, reduced protection from environmental stress
What are the effects of farming?
- Harvesting of populations needs a good grasp of all aspects of biology so that they can avoid collapse
What are the effects of hunting?
- sex based hunting, killing a lot of males or a lot of females can hurt populations (grizzly bears)
- Complex biases: only hunting bigger salmon which results in less and more jacks
What is an anthropological disturbance?
Light pollution, water turbidity, sound pollution
What is an example for anthropological disturbance having to do with light pollution?
Turtles have a really hard time when there is light pollution around mating season, as they follow light to go back to the water. So cities have become mindful and now do not have lights on or use a red light
What are issues of animals that are kept in captivity?
- Imprinting problems
- Lack of recognition of threats
- Lack of hunting skills
- Movement problems
- Stress and boredom
- small population effects
- personality selection
Why do we have zoo’s ?
- last hope of survival for the species
- to inform conservation
- Education for the public: improves interest in the animal
- Raises money for conservation
- provides individuals for reintroduction
What are drawbacks of zoos?
- Difficult to prepare species for reintroduction
- Gene pool restricted
- species specific behaviors
- very few, charismatic species benefit
What are the problems with imprinting?
many behaviors are learned an not innate … for example chicks learn everything about being a bird when they are young like: 1. who to mate with 2. who to follow on migration
- Problem for feeding and reintroduction
What is the issue with recognition of threats? (with animals in captivity)
Animals held in captivity aren’t as afraid of the predators that they should be afraid of. This is a problem in Australia
Lack of hunting skill:
predators must learn from experience, how to stalk, bring down prey and kill. Feeding whole animal carcasses encourages stalking, play, pouncing, rolling on skins.
How can movement in the environment affect animals?
In the 1980s Golden Lion Tamarinds were introduced back into the wild, but most didn’t survive because they weren’t used to moving branches so they would loose balance and fall off. Now in zoos they have moving branches so they get that skill.
What is an alternative to full reintroduction?
Soft release: release from an enclosure to which they can return for additional food, then you maintain the food until they cease to return, it assumes that hunting is learned.
How is stress an issue for animals in zoos?
- It is really an issue in old-style zoos
- People are too close, noise is too high, aggressive cage mates
- It is recognized by high levels of cortisol in blood or urine
What are the two types of stress for the animals in the zoo?
Acute stress: short term stimulation - novelty, excitement, anticipation. Vital in small doses to avoid boredom.
Chronic stress: long term and detrimental - depression, helplessness, chronic boredom. Really bad - reduces the immune system, depresses breeding, reduces survival
What is the issue with boredom in zoos?
recognized by things like pacing, crib-chewing, rocking, self-harm, feather plucking
What are stereotypies?
functionless, repetitive movements not seen in wild conspecifics
How do we help create more natural behavior for animals in zoos?
- Scatter-feeding, puzzle-feeders, ice-blocks of food or blood
- woodpiles with food underneath
- forage and browse provisions
- mixed species exhibits
What is contra-freeloading?
because foraging is appetitive, animals get a reward from the process of looking for and finding food
Who does better in captivity vs. worse ?
Animals with small home ranges do better in captivity, and animals that have large home ranges to really poorly in captivity.
What are the effects of small populations?
- Danger of in-breeding: there are great precautions to not do this but with rare species it is hard to do this
- Lack of mate choice: evidence shows that when females have a choice they breed better
What is animal personality?
zookeepers get to know animals, and there are differences in personality.
- some personalities are favored by the zoo environment more
What parts of behavioral ecology does climate change affect?
- Direct affects in CO2 which affects different kinds of animals (leaf-cutter ants)
- Phenology: change in timing, migration etc.
Range shifts: where animals are, areas that end up
What is phenology?
the study of how organisms time their behavior through the year e.g. migration, breeding, hibernation, timed very closely with plant phenology (source of food)
What is a range shift?
geographic changes of where a species lives, could shift upward towards the poles. This can cause issues as new species can act like invasive species, or they do really poorly because they aren’t’ used to the environment - like the food and temp
What is anthropomorphism?
considering all animals as if they have the same cognitive experience of the world as we do.
What are five widely recognized animal personalities?
1) shy/bold: bold = risk takers, fast to action shy = avoids risk and unfamiliarity
2) exploration avoidance: reaction to novel situations, new habitat, food, object
3) Activity: level of activity
4) Aggressiveness
5) Sociability: reaction to the presence of conspecifics
What are Explorers known for (personality)?
They are aggressive, approach novel objects, explore new environments and spend little time in one area
What are Non-explorers known for?
Not aggressive, avoid novel objects no foraging patterns, reluctant to explore but spend longer learning about the environment.
What is adaptive plasticity?
Personality types are genetically based - but like most traits they may also be influenced by the environment.
What is plasticity by itself?
it means that a trait may vary in how strongly it’s expressed depending on the circumstance
- we should expect some personalities to be constant across different conditions and for some to show adaptive plasticity
What are the three orders of intentionality for consciousness?
- the ability to hold abstract ideas: independent of what you are seeing at the time
- Self-awareness: (mirror test is a good one)
- Manipulation and deception: if animals are aware of each others thoughts, they may use this knowledge to manipulate or deceive them
