Animal Behavior Final Exam
Which of the following is NOT true?
A star-nosed mole is particularly sensitive to odors detected by the Eimer's organs in its nostrils
Which of the following is NOT true:
Among honeybees, young worker bees display a circadian rhythm in their behaviors as they care for young in the hive during one phase of a 24-hour cycle and then engage in honey-maintenance chores during another part of the cycle; older workers likewise display such a rhythm but in their case the rhythm involves their foraging behavior
Which of the following is NOT reasonable?
An impala eating a placenta following birthing is probably doing so for the same reason that some birds remove egg shells from their nests.
Why might the ears of males and females of this species of fly have different tuning curves? Which of the following is a proximate, as opposed to an ultimate, explanation:
Because their receptors are the products of different gene × environment interactions
In ants, bees and wasps, why are female workers very closely related to their reproducing sisters only if their mother has mated with just one male?
Because they will share exactly the same genetic information that makes up the paternal contribution to their genome.
Which of the following is NOT true?
By engaging in infanticidal behavior, a male may reduce the prospect of his investing time and energy to raise young that are not genetically related to him
Which of the following is true of the preying mantis?
Cells within each segmental ganglion control the motor output of that segment.
In a spider that lives in the deserts of the Middle East, web-building females guard an egg sac until the spiderlings emerge from the fertilized eggs within; the young spiders then consume their mother. Males search for females, finding very few in their lifetime. If they encounter an egg-guarding female, they will try to remove her egg sac. Females fight back and sometimes kill and eat the male. But males sometimes succeed in destroying the egg sac. Males probably engage in such behavior so as to reduce the potential for a population of this species to grow to such numbers that the survival of individuals is jeopardized because of overcrowding.
False
Which of the following is NOT true of the control of feeding behavior in the blowfly?
Feeding occurs when neural signals from the feet are transmitted along neurons that go directly to the proboscis and direct muscles to extend the proboscis.
Red-sided garter snakes in Canada typically copulate in the Spring as the ambient temperature rises following a cold winter.
Females are capable of storing sperm for a year and can then use the viable sperm from a prior year to fertilize eggs in the current year
Which of the following is true or seem reasonable of white-fronted bee-eater birds that nest gregariously along river banks?
For white-fronted bee-eater birds, females show a preference for solitary males over males attended by subordinate helpers because she will tend to have the undivided attentions of the solitary one when incubating and feeding her young
Which of the following is true?
If a noctuid moth detects ultrasonics signals from an insectivorous bat, it is more likely to respond in such a way as to avoid the bat if it "hears" a pattern of continuous ultrasonics than if they hear pulsed ultrasonics.
Imagine a cricket that displays a circadian rhythm in its ambulatory activity. information from the retinas of the eyes to the optic lobes of the brain. demonstrated that the temporal pattern of walking activity is significantly governed by a biological clock.)
If cutting the optic nerve results in a free running pattern of ambulatory activity under normal environmental conditions, eye must play a role in entraining the clock.
Imagine a cricket that displays a circadian rhythm in its ambulatory activity. The optic nerve carries sensory information from the retinas of the eyes to the optic lobes of the brain. (Assume that it has been demonstrated that the temporal pattern of walking activity is significantly governed by a biological clock.)
If the circadian pacemaker is in the brain, then severing the nerves between the brain and the subesophageal ganglion should result in a free running pattern of behavior
Which of the following is NOT true?
In Florida scrub jays, females generally disperse from their natal nest while males are more likely to remain. The altruistic behavior of a male who assists as a functionally sterile helper indirectly contributes to its own inclusive fitness because the resident breeder lives longer and produces more offspring.
Which of the following is NOT true:
In mammals, the daily 'setting' of a mammal's circadian pacemaker relies on sensory input that is received by sensory receptors on the pineal gland.
Consider two young male spotted hyenas who have just reached sexual maturity. Alpha was born to a high-ranking female and Beta was born to a low-ranking female.
Neither will remain. Males never stay in their natal group after reaching sexually maturity; females being larger and stronger will drive them out.
Which of the following is true of bower birds?
Only females of bowerbird species incubate the eggs
Which of the following is true of fireflies?
Some fireflies imitate the flash sequence of others. Imitation of flashes increases one's attractiveness to prospective mates
Some animals eat certain clays. Which of the following is true?
Some parrots eat dirt. They do so because the soils contain compounds that detoxify compounds they have eaten
In a group of meerkats, a male gives a number of alarm calls that in total save the lives of two sisters as well as three offspring of another sibling. But by giving these alarm calls, the male was exposed to risk of attack from predators and eventually he was killed by a hawk as a result of having given the alarm. As a result of the shortening of his life, he did not produce three surviving offspring that he otherwise would have had.
The benefit to the male in units of inclusive fitness for his alarm call altruism is 1.75
California ground squirrels display a mobbing behavior when challenged by snakes. Which of the following is NOT true?
The ground squirrels are more likely to mob larger rattlesnakes than smaller ones because of the greater threat they pose to the squirrel young
There is controversy over whether the ability to learn songs evolved once or more than once in birds. The phylogeny below identifies three taxonomic groups that can learn songs. Members of the other twenty orders of birds produce complex vocalizations, but they do not have to learn how to do so:
The hypothesis that song learning evolved once in the lineage leading to the three modern taxa that can sing would be supported by the observation that the ZENK gene is only found in orders of birds that can learn songs.
Which of the following is true in song birds?
The zebra finch is a small monogamous Australian species in which males sing but females do not. Deafening an adult male will probably result in a bird that will not sing at all.
Which of the following is true of spotted hyenas?
They have a matrilineal social order
Which of the following is true of the developmental plasticity of some animals?
Tiger salamanders have a developmental flexibility. Whether or not an individual develops into the larger-than-normal morph, in part, depends on the size of the salamander population
The cricket, Teleogryllus oceanicus, as described in the textbook, has an auditory system that includes sensitivity to bat ultrasonic chirps. Which of the following is NOT true?
When a cricket adjusts its flight to evade a bat, it does so by beating the wing on the side of its body nearest the bat faster than the wing on the other side. The result is that it turns away from the bat.
If there was a third activity pattern for an animal in constant darkness, we would reasonably expect:
a random pattern of activity and inactivity
In the case of Belding's ground squirrels living in Yosemite
an individual who sees a hawk and gives the appropriate warning call draws attention to itself and is more likely to be killed than one who does not call. However, by calling close kin profit.
There are numerous species of coral reef fish for which adults are capable of switching from one sex to another. It is most typical for fish to begin reproducing as males and then switching to females. Only when one is:
by switching from one sex to another, a individual can fertilize its own eggs when the density of the population is low thereby reducing the risk that the species will go extinct
If a trait has "adaptive value," the trait:
confers a reproductive advantage on individuals
In Lake Tanganyika in Africa, there is a species of cichlid fish with two types of males. Some males are brightly colored and others are drab, and in their coloration, they resemble females. Which of the following is NOT true?
drab-colored males are genetically distinct from their brightly-colored individuals; they are smaller, satellite and steal food
Which of the following make(s) good sense for females of polyandrous species?
females will engage in a disproportionately great amount of parental care compared with males
In the video, Meat Eaters, that focused on carnivorous birds, we learned that:
kestrels were able to detect the presence of voles without seeing the animal because their eyes are sensitive to in the UV portion of the electromagnetic spectrum which allows them to detect the presence of the rodents' urine.
Which of the following is true of orchids and the thynnine wasps that visit them in Australia?
male wasps appear to habituate to the odors emitted by orchids in particular locations
Take a hive of honey bees and train the workers between 8:00 and 9:00 in the morning to fly to a sugar-water feeder 300 meters due east from the hive. Then trap the bees inside the hive and move it to a new location 600 meters due east of its original location. After three hours have passed, unplug the hive and let the bees again search for food. Some of the workers that were foraging earlier in the morning will again seek out the sugar-water feeder by flying 300 meters
north-west
Ablate the protocerebral ganglion in a preying mantis and it will
not be able to coordinate most motor activity
A badger living in Oklahoma could hunt for either scorpions or ground squirrels (or both). Scorpions provide only 10 calories each, but require only 2 minutes to find, on average, with an additional 3 minutes to remove the stinger; ground squirrels offer 1000 calories, but take an average of 3 hours to find and an additional 90 minutes to capture, kill, and consume. If the badger's ultimate goal is to maximize its rate of caloric gain, should it forage for squirrels, scorpions, or both?
scorpions only because they provide about 50% more calories per hour of foraging as do the squirrels
If the data collected for the graph were not gathered for the sole purpose of describing the hearing abilities of the fly, then (for the evolutionary biologists who did the research) the graph constitutes a:
test of a prediction on fly hearing ability based on the kind of sound frequencies produced by crickets.
Which of the following is a Darwinian natural selectionist, but not a group selectionist, explanation for why Lemmings leave where they are living when population densities get very high?
they have better chances of reproducing in places where the population density is lower.
In class, we learned that (Vinchucas) assassin bugs orient to a perspective food source by recognizing carbon dioxide (CO2) and temperature.
they orient away from heat and toward relatively cooler areas which are associated with more hospitable environment for raising their young
In langur troops, there are occasions when adult males will kill sexually immature individuals:
this killing is adaptive because it increases the prospect that the males doing the killing will be successful i fathering offspring
Stotting by a Thompson's gazelle most likely functions:
to warn neighboring gazelles of the presence of a predator
