Chapter 51

Question 1

behavior

Answer 1

acts or reactions that an organism, an individual or a system produces in response to a particular circumstance. It may be induced by stimuli or inputs from the environment whether internal or external, conscious or subconscious, overt or covert, and voluntary or involuntary.

Question 2

releasers/sign

Answer 2

a stimulus that serves as the initiator of complex reflex behavior.

Question 3

stimuli

Answer 3

A detectable change in the internal or external environment.

Question 4

critical/sensitive period

Answer 4

a maturational stage in the lifespan of an organism during which the nervous system is especially sensitive to certain environmental stimuli.

Question 5

proximate

Answer 5

an event which is closest to, or immediately responsible for causing, some observed result

Question 6

innate behavior

Answer 6

do not have to be learned or practiced.

Question 7

cognition

Answer 7

The mental process of knowing, thinking, learning and judging.

Question 8

causation

Answer 8

The act of causing or producing an effect or a result.

Question 9

cost-benefit analysis

Answer 9

a process by which business decisions are analyzed. The benefits of a given situation or business-related action are summed, and then the costs associated with taking that action are subtracted.

Question 10

ultimate

Answer 10

usually thought of as the “real” reason something occurred.

Question 11

optimal foraging

Answer 11

a model that helps predict how an animal behaves when searching for food. Although obtaining food provides the animal with energy, searching for and capturing the food require both energy and time.

Question 12

echolocation

Answer 12

is the biological sonar used by several kinds of animals. Echolocating animals emit calls out to the environment and listen to the echoes of those calls that return from various objects near them. They use these echoes to locate and identify the objects.

Question 13

classical conditioning

Answer 13

onditioning in which the conditioned stimulus (as the sound of a bell) is paired with and precedes the unconditioned stimulus (as the sight of food) until the conditioned stimulus alone is sufficient to elicit the response (as salivation in a dog)

Question 14

fixed action patterns

Answer 14

is sometimes used in ethology to denote an instinctive behavioral sequence that is relatively invariant within the species and almost inevitably runs to completion.

Question 15

imprinting

Answer 15

rapid learning that occurs during a brief receptive period, typically soon after birth or hatching, and establishes a long-lasting behavioral response to a specific individual or object, as attachment to parent, offspring, or site

Question 16

signal

Answer 16

any kind of coded message sent from one organism to another, or from one place in an organism to another place

Question 17

orientation

Answer 17

the act or process of orienting or the state of being oriented. position or positioning with relation to the points of the compass or other specific directions. the adjustment or alignment of oneself or one’s ideas to surroundings or circumstances.

Question 18

piloting

Answer 18

A mechanism of migration in which an animal moves from one familiar landmark to the next.

Question 19

altruism

Answer 19

an organism is said to behave altruistically when its behaviour benefits other organisms, at a cost to itself. The costs and benefits are measured in terms of reproductive fitness, or expected number of offspring.

Question 20

taxis

Answer 20

a motion or orientation of a cell, organism, or part in response to an external stimulus.

Question 21

compass orientation

Answer 21

simple and directional navigation

Question 22

coefficient of relatedness

Answer 22

between two individuals is defined as the percentage of genes that those two individuals share by common descent.

Question 23

phototaxis

Answer 23

the bodily movement of a motile organism in response to light, either toward the source of light ( positive phototaxis ) or away from it ( negative phototaxis ).

Question 24

true navigation

Answer 24

navigation that is complex and directed to a point

Question 25

Hamilton’s rule

Answer 25

kin selection causes genes to increase in frequency when the genetic relatedness of a recipient to an actor multiplied by the benefit to the recipient is greater than the reproductive cost to the actor.

Question 26

phonotaxis

Answer 26

The movement of an organism in relation to a sound source

Question 27

circadian clock

Answer 27

is any biological process that displays an endogenous, entrainable oscillation of about 24 hours.

Question 28

kin selection

Answer 28

a type of natural selection in which an individual attempts to ensure the survival of its own genes by protecting closely related individuals first

Question 29

migration

Answer 29

the relatively long-distance movement of individuals, usually on a seasonal basis.

Question 30

reciprocal altruism

Answer 30

a behaviour whereby an organism acts in a manner that temporarily reduces its fitness while increasing another organism’s fitness, with the expectation that the other organism will act in a similar manner at a later time.