Behavioural Ecology Flashcards
What is behavioural ecology?
Focuses on adaptation to understand how behaviours interacts with an environment
What is “Fitness”
“The success of an organism to contribute offspring to future generations” often measured as number of grandkids
Phenotypic gambit
The assumption that genetic architecture is not constraining or inhibiting evolutionary trajectories
Ultimate questions
Ask about the behaviours significance evolutionarily. e.g. does this behaviour enhance reproductive success
Proximate questions
asks about the immediate cause of a behaviour, could be hormonal, neurological, cognitive or cultural…
Tinbergen’s four questions
Function (adaptation)
Evolution (phylogeny)
Causation (mechanism)
Development (ontogeny)
What are the four ways to test if behaviour is inherited
- correlation between parents and offspring
- cross breeding experiments
- artificial selection experiments
- molecular underpinnings
Benefits of living in groups
- Not as many predators- scare them off
- Foraging
- information/learning
- cooperation
Costs of living in a group
Disease spreads faster
Parasites
Competition if there is not much food
Antipredator benefits
- If you are small you are likely to have a large predator
- one on one there is not a good change
- In a group though, there is lesser risk
*CALLED THE DILUTION OF RISK
Confusion effect
everyone looking the same to confuse the predator on the prey they wanted
Oddity effect
e.g. A zebra with a herd of bison (the zebra would be eaten since they are the ‘oddity’)
Shared vigilance benefits
More eyes on predator, therefore faster detection
Foraging benefits
Looking out for predators on your own if you are not in a group means that you cannot eat. Therefore if you are in a larger group you can share it around and therefore increase foraging time as someone else would stay on lookout
Information and learning
If you cant find food than it can kill you
need to be smart and think about where to get food when living in a group
Local enhancement: “Restaurant effect”
if there is a restaurant with heaps of people we would tend to chose that over one with no one in it, same with animals
Mutually beneficial cooperation
Same as mutualistic symbiotic relationship, it mutually benefits both parties.
Hamilton’s rule for helping
Altruism is favoured if
rB >C
r = coefficient of relatedness to recipient
B- benefit to the recipient
C = cost to the donor
*therefore the closer the genetic relatedness the closer the altruism is more likely and the greater the benefit to the cost
Altruism
Selfless concern for the wellbeing of others
Hamilton rule - alarm call example
alarm calls grow attention to yourself so at what point would you call an alarm to save others, but risk your own life?
E.g. red kangaroos would save sister over half sister
Ways that animals can cooperate or behave altruistically
- Hunting
- Alarm calling
- Mobbing
- Reproduction
- Territory defense
- Nest building
- Task division
Alarm calling
- an animal can chose to stay silent or to sound the alarm
- Pay a cost for sounding the alarm as the predator will be attracted
Cooperative breeding
- Non- breeding helpers raise young by dominant breeders
Two types of breeding
Obligate and Facultative
