BIO SCI 94 Chapter Notes - Chapter 53: Monarch Butterfly, Ant Colony, Sexual Selection

• School: UC-Irvine
• Department: Biological Sciences
• Course: BIO SCI 94
• Professor: Robin Bush

Document Summary

Behavior - an action in response to a stimulus. Behavioral ecology - study of how organisms respond to particular stimuli from their environments. All organisms respond in some way to signals from their environment, but most behavioral research performed on animals esp. vertebrates, arthropods, mollusks. Proximate (mechanistic) causation explains how actions occur in terms of the genetic, neurological, hormonal, and skeletal- muscular mechanisms involved. Ultimate (evolutionary) causation explains why actions occur based on their evolutionary consequences and history. Behavior just like phenotype and can evolve. It"s important to recognize that efforts to explain behavior at the proximate and ultimate levels are complementary. To understand what an organism is doing, biologists want to know how the behavior happens and why. Argentine ants in native s. amer. fight with neighboring argentine ants, but in introduced area, they"re friendly to other argentine ants, but especially aggressive against native ants. Proximate cause - scents from hydrocarbon tags on exoskeleton.