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
