lecture 2 - principles of animal behavior Flashcards
what are tinbergen’s four questions
- mechanism –> what causes the behavior?
- development –> how does the behavior develop?
- survival value –> what is the function of the behavior?
- evolutionary history –> how does the behavior evolve
who is nikolaas tinbergen
dutch biologist and ornithologist who got nobel prize in 1973 for discoveries about organization and elicitation of individual and social behavior patterns in animals
what is the importance of tinbergen’s four questions
any question you ask will fall into one of these 4 categories
what is proximate analysis
focuses on immediate causes for behavior (mostly mechanism and developmental questions)
what is ultimate analysis
defined in terms of evolutionary forces that shape a trait over time (more survival value and evolutionary questions)
define behavior
the coordinated response of organisms to internal and external stimuli
what are the three foundations of behavior
- natural selection
- individual learning
- cultural transmission
which traits are selected for in natural selection
heritable traits that make it so there is highest relative reproductive success
why might animals be xenophobic
strangers can represent a threat because they compete for scarce resources like food and mates and they may disrupt group dynamics
what can individual learning alter
the frequency of behaviors displayed within lifetime of an organism
what is cultural transmission
when animals learn something by copying the behaviors of others
how can natural selection affect cultural transmission and individual learning
it can act on the animals’ ability to transmit, acquire and act on the newly learned info (will select animals that are better at transmitting it, learning it and using of the info)
what trait has been selected for in the common mole rat in terms of aggression/xenophobia
when resources are limited, natural selection has selected for stronger xenophobic responses however it has also favored males who temper their xenophobia when around the opposite sex.
what have female elk learned in regards to hunters and how have they learned this
individual learning
they learn to evade hunters as they age (step length decreases, use of terrain ruggedness increases, use of forest increases when close to road)
how do norway rats use cultural transmission in regards to scavenging
smelling other rats provides clues about what it has eaten so then the rat knows what new food they are safe to eat
