Week 1 - Intro to Animal Behaviour Flashcards
What are Tinbergen’s 4 questions?
- Why do animals respond to enviro stimuli in a particular way?
- Why do animals repond to internal stimuli in a particular way?
- Why do some animals respond in one way and others in another way to the same situation?
- Why do animals of a particular species, or group, characteristically behave in particular ways in particular situations?
What is the Darwin-Wallace Principal?
- members of pop vary in traits
- usually heritable between parents and offspring
- survival and repro DON’T come down to chance
- selection acts on variation among individuals
Give an example of Darwin-Wallace Principal
Female peacock chooses to mate with male with brightest feathers and best dance.
Domestication is a ______ strategy for survival
Biological
What is ethology?
science of animal behaviour
What is animal behaviour?
How the animal interacts with its environment
Why an animal acts and responds to a stimulus or environmental factors
What are the 2 levels for studying behaviour and what are their definitions?
- Proximate level
- How behaviour happens
- Internal mechanisms and motivation
- How behaviour happens
- Ultimate level
- Why behaviour occurs
- evolutionary value of behaviour
- Why behaviour occurs
How do cockroaches avoid being stepped on?
Small hairs on legs and body that sense atmospheric changes when something comes to squish it so it systematically causes the legs to move and the animal to get out of the way (no thought needed, happens automatically)
What are genetic-developmental mechanisms?
Effects of heredity on behaviour
Gene-enviro interactions underlying development of sensory-motor mechanisms
Sensory-motor mechanisms?
Nervous system detection of enviro stimuli (perception)
Hormone systems for sdjusting responsiveness to enviro stimuli
Muscular-skeletal systems for carrying out responses
What are the ultimate causes of behaviour?
Historical pathways leading to current behaviour
Selective processes shaping the history of a behavioural trait
- Welfare??
Simplified version of Tinbergen’s 4 questions?
- Function – how does it help improve survival or reproductive success?
- Evolution – how has it changed over the course of time
- Causation – what internal/external factors lead to performing that
particular behavior at that particular time? - Development – how does behavior change with maturity – internal and
external factors?
Why study animal behaviour?
– Production aims
– improve the efficiency of production
– enable rapid detection of injured, sick or ‘distressed’ animals
– ensure acceptable animal welfare through socially-responsible animal
production
– improve the farmer’s economy (i.e., human / societal welfare)
- understand whats normal and abnormal behaviour
Humans are a ____ between the environment and animals
Buffer
Pressures to assist evolutionary change?
Climate change
– drought / floods
– forests disappeared –food supply diminishes
– what were the likely predators of hominids?
– small populations (survival of the fittest -adaptation)
– ice ages (sea levels drop) -enabled dispersion out of Africa
