BIOL 111 Lecture Notes - Population Ecology, Reciprocal Altruism, Behavioral Ecology

Behavioral Ecology

• What is optimal foraging theory? Be able to explain examples of animal behavior in terms of optimal foraging theory.

• Be able to draw and explain a figure like Figure 8.6.

• How does foraging behavior change in response to predators?

• Explain how squirrel tail flagging behavior and snake response to it benefits both squirrels and snakes.

• Explain crow predator mobbing and its costs and benefits.

• Which animals are likely to be monogamous? What is social monogamy and why might it be advantageous for some species?

• What are brood parasites and what are the advantages and disadvantages of being one? Why do the host parents fall for it?

Please Help. Thank you very much.

Ecology is the study of how organisms interact with their environment. Thus, a central question in ecology concerns how organisms respond to environmental variation. The flip side of this question is to ask whether the variation in characteristics of organisms is the result of variation in features of the environment. This variation can occur in space or through time.

1. Make a list of all the environmental variables that you can think of that are likely to be important to organisms. Think about plants and microbes as well as animals.

1A. One environmental change of great concern to us is climate change, specifically the prospect of human-caused global warming, a topic to which we will return. How do organisms respond to this spatial and temporal variability in the environment?

Social behavior looks at organisms big and small to view their interactions. The amount of social behavior exhibited by a species may be small or extremely plentiful. Contrast, using the appropriate terms, the social behavior of two species that exhibit very different social behaviors (i.e. normal social behaviors vs. eusociality).

The life history of an organism can be flexible to the environment, some changes are temporary while some have to be more permanent, like in response to a shifting climate. Provide the appropriate terms and two examples that demonstrates an organism accommodating in 1) short term and 2) long term ways.