Quiz Flashcards
foraging
getting food
How many different way can you think of in which animals forage?
- hunting
- scavenging
- eating dead animals
For one of these examples, come up with an adaptation that makes foraging more efficient.
For hunting: speed, awareness, reaction time, and camouflage
For scavenging: knowing where to look for food
Adaptation
a characteristic that improves an organism’s match with its environment
Coevolution
when two species are adapting
to each other over evolutionary time
counter- adaptive
an adaptation to another organism’s adaptation
what is an example of counter-adaptive?
- hearing the lynx to get away
- dogs covering their coat in dirt to mask their natural smell
Who do you think “wins” the interaction more often, the lynx or the hare? Think about how you would explain your answer!
The lynx would win more often because the selection of the bunny is much stronger! For the bunny, it is life or death while the lynx has multiple opportunities to catch bunnies.
Life-dinner principle
in predator-prey interactions, the penalty is greater for the prey, so selection for speed (etc.) is stronger.
Think of a counter-adaptation that might evolved in the species being eaten in your example.
Better eyesight to see a predator from afar
What is coevolution? How is it different from evolving in response to an abiotic factor, like climate?
Coevolution is where two (or more) species affect each other’s evolution. It’s different because it is a response between species, not int he environment. The climate does not evolve in response.
Optimal foraging theory
A school of thought dedicated to understanding the foraging decisions of animals.
The main assumption of OFT is…
that foraging decisions are made
to optimize fitness.
The currency of OFT is…
time and/or energy
What does the red line on the (state graph name here) represent?
The red line represents when plants are eaten in proportion to their abundance. This might represent a preference for the species that are more abundant, or no preference at all! In other words, if feeding is random, caterpillars would be eating the most abundant plants the most often, and eating rare plants rarely.
Come up with two hypotheses as to why a particular plant might be preferred by the caterpillar. How you would test these hypotheses?
- the plant may have an abundance of nutrients
- there may be an abundance of the plant
- add more from blue book!!!!
Caterpillars with large bodies often…
… have the most offspring!
proximate cause of behavior: HOW
anatomical, physiological and/or genetic mechanisms that enable a particular behavior to occur
vocab for proximate cause
Hormone
Gene
Neuron
Receptor
Sensation/feeling
Environmental Cue
Physiological
ultimate cause of behavior: WHY
the reasons that a particular behavior and its underlying mechanisms were favored by natural selection; reasons that acknowledge ancestry and ancestral selection environments
vocab for ultimate cause
Evolution
History
Fitness
Natural Selection
Sexual Selection
Benefit/Cost
Selection environment
Adaptation
ethology
The study of the proximate and ultimate cause of behavior
Instinct
a behavior that can be performed without prior experience
Which of the following words might be associated with instinct?
- innate
- inborn
- natural
- intuitive
Fixed action pattern
an instinctive sequence of behaviors that usually runs to completion once initiated
sign stimulus (aka: releaser)
a specific feature of a stimulus that is necessary in order to elicit a response
innate releasing mechanism
the neural mechanism that enable the detection of the sign stimulus and the initiation of the fixed action pattern
what is a releaser?
a stimulus from another animal that causes a certain response
In the bird feeding the chick diagram, what is the releaser, fixed action pattern, and the innate releasing mechanism?
Releaser: looking at the spot on mother’s beak
fixed action pattern: pecking
Innate releasing mechanism: some sensory neuron in the eye connected to the brain which sends the signal to the muscles
What types of sensory receptors might be involved in the innate releasing mechanism for feeding behavior in the chick?
sight and taste
superstimulus
a stimulus that can elicit a stronger response than the stimulus for which it evolved
how do we quantify foraging preferences?
- if it’s in the species diet
- frequency of eating
how do time and energy spent foraging relate to fitness?
the species has an energy budget
what can plants do when animals bite them?
they can change their gene expression to change the quality of the tissue; making it taste bad to animals
what is the model called?
optimal prey choice model: predicts which prey is preferred based on costs and benefits to the predator
what is the profit equation
P=E/(H+S)
- profit
- energy obtained from prey
- handling (usually measure in time)
- search time
what does handling mean?
it is the caloric cost of catching, chewing digesting : measured in time
If E gets bigger and H and S stay the same, what happens to P?
P gets bigger
If H or S get bigger and E stays the same, what happens to P?
P gets smaller
what is a specific hypothesis regarding WHY some plants might stimulate feeding to a greater degree than others in a caterpillar?
sensory receptors sense sugar and feed on the plant
what is a good difference between receptors
sensitivity vs. # of receptors
If a particular sensory receptor is stimulated more by plant A, can we assume that more of plant A will be eaten?
No! It depends if the receptor cell excites (activates) or inhibits the next neuron! It might taste disgusting to another species
What factors might vary in the cells of the nervous system of these caterpillars that causes their feeding behavior to vary?
sensory cells/ receptors: taste, smell, sight. different types of receptors detect smell and taste sensations
gaba
inhibitory neurons: lets more negative ions in. More negative and less likely to respond to new stimuli. LESS SENSITIVE
glutamate
excitatory neurons: lets more positive ions in. More likely to generate electrical impulses. MORE SENSITIVE
sum of depolarization
does it give the signal or not?
