Lecture 30-31 (Animal Behavior)

1. What is behavior and why is it important?

• Behavior is what an animal does and how it does it.

• Behavior is a major factor influencing the distribution and abundance of animals, and interactions between animals and among animals and other organisms.

2. Behavior has both proximate and ultimate causes

• Proximate questions are mechanistic, concerned with the environmental stimuli that trigger a behavior, as well as the genetic and physiological mechanisms underlying a behavioral act.

• Ultimate questions address the evolutionary significance for a behavior and why natural selection favors this behavior.

3. Behavior results from both genes and environmental factors

• In biology, the nature-versus-nurture issue is not about whether genes or environment influence behavior, but that both are involved.

• Case studies that are used as evidence

4. Innate behavior is developmentally fixed

• These behaviors are due to genetic programming.

• The range of environmental differences among individuals does not appear to alter the behavior.

• FAP

5. Behavioral ecology emphasizes evolutionary hypotheses

• Behavioral ecology is the research field that views behavior as an evolutionary adaptation to the natural ecological conditions of animals.

• We expect animals to behave in ways that maximize their fitness (this idea is valid only if genes influence behavior).

6. Types of behaviors and examples

7. Social behavior

· Three types of fitness

8. Sexual Selection

· Costs and benefits