Class

Explain benifits of territoriality

- Ability to utilize resources on a territory without interference from others - More opportunities to court females

Explain male displays

- Actions to court a female for mating - Most courtships end with an abrupt departure of a indifferent female

What are factors inducing male monogamy in spotted sandpipers

- Adult sex ratio is male biased - Nest in areas with immense mayfly hatches leading to superabundant food - Young are precocious, single parent can care for kids nearly as well as two parents - Females who desert first clutch of eggs and find new ones do not harm survival of their first batch of offspring

Explain the adaptive value of learning

- Animals learn to modify their behavior based on past experience - Learning is similar to polyphenism as it confers a highly focused behavioral flexibility that requires developmental modifications in the nervous system - Capacity for learning can be adaptive but does not come without cost - Ex. Brainpower required for extra learning circuits as in marsh wrens - West coast wrens produce more songs than east coast wrens and have a larger song control system

Explain optimality theory and foraging decisions

- Animals make many decisions about foraging that are critical to survival including where to forage, what to eat and when to search for prey

Explain sensory receptors and survival in noctuid moths

- Bats use echo location to locate objects in the dark - Noctuid moths have ability to avoid echolocating bats by detecting their high frequency sounds - Ability was discovered by Kenneth Roeder - Ear vibrates when a high frequency sound is detected, this triggers a neural response to allow the moth to evade bats - Ear features two auditory receptors (A1 and A2) linked to a tympanum on the exterior of the moth that vibrates when exposed to high frequency sounds

Explain the evolution of helpful behaviour

- Benefit of social life is potential for cooperation - Those that receive help also benefit if they reproduce more then they would have otherwise

Explain song matching and communication of aggressive intent in the song sparrow

- Best males are those who can signal exactly what his aggressive intentions are toward a particular individual - If you have a larger repitoir you have more options and are able to avoid fights - When focal male sings a shared song at a rival the neighbor has three options: - Singing a Type Match which will escalate the interaction - Singing a repertoire match which will keep an interaction at the same level - Singing an unshared song which will deescalate the interaction

Explain sensory exploitation in whistling moths

- Capable of detecting ultrasonic signals generated by male moths - Modifications of ears that were used by ancestors to detect bats - Bat detecting system could have been co-opted as communication system with mate searching females - Females are receivers of communication and males are signalers

Explain risk of injury while consuming prey

- Catfish have locking spines that are dangerous to swallow - If catfish is dead it cannot erect spine so prey will stab catfish several times to ensure it is dead before they eat them - Catfish that are teared up and eaten in small bits renders the spine ineffective

Explain the scarab beetles and mating tactics

- Conditional strategy - Large horns means smaller testes - Smaller individuals loose fights to larger individuals - Smaller males have larger testes and attempt to sneak copulations with female, transfer large quantities of sperm in doing so - At some point during larval growth males developmental mechanisms sense that body is likely to be small, male shifts investments of resources away from growing horns and into growing large testes

Explain wolfs and social behaviour

- Coordinated attack on single individual that they have isolated from herd - Swarm prey and pull it down - Single wolf could not have accomplished what pack did together - Subordinate females rarely try to reproduce - Dominant female is only one that reproduces - Subordinate females help dominant female by sharing costs of hunting

Explain genetic influences on behaviour in garter snakes

- Costal garter snakes eat banana slugs - Inland garter snakes dont eat banana slugs - Inland and coastal garter snakes behaved very differently when presented with slug scent - Different tongue flicking behaviours between costal and inland snakes - Hybrid snakes show intermediate response to slug extract, evidence of a genetic difference in behavior

Explain sensory exploitation in water mites

- Courting male water mites tap into preexisting sensory abilities of females - Female is waiting for edible copepod - Female adopts specific pose called net stance - Male encounters a female in this pose vibrate a leg infront of her which imitates a approaching copepod - Female grabs male but releases male unharmed - Male will place spermatophores near female which she will pick up in genital opening if she is receptive - If males trigger a prey-detection response then unfed hungry females would be more responsive to male signals then well fed females - Male behavior is hereditary basis spread because of its effective preexisting prey-detection mechanism in females

Explain female mate choice for paternal males

- Courtship displays signal ability of male to perform as parent - stickleback fish carotenoids signal ability to fan eggs longer which increases hatching success - ospreys and terns courtship feeds females and signals ability to deliver food to kids

Explain avian brood parasitism and deceit

- Cowbirds and cuckoos lay eggs in nests of other bird species - Cuckoo eggs mimic host eggs deceiving the unsuspecting host parents who pay a heavy cost to raise foreign offspring - Parasitic babies kill all the host parents babies

Explain fat reserves and resource holding power

- Determine winner of territorial conflicts in many animals that use flying as part of fighting since ability to continue flying is related to individuals energy reserves - Shows not size but fat reserves are important - Male with more fat reserves/energy reserves wins

Explain male and female gametes

- Differ greatly in size - Small sperm outnumber large eggs - Sets stage for completion among males to fertilize eggs called sperm competition - Males contribution to next generation depends on how many sexual partners he has - Female reproductive success is limited to number of eggs she can produce - Bird egg may constitute up to 20% of females body mass

Explain optimal foraging in blue whales

- Dive underwater for up to 15 mins in search of krill - Surges into shoal of krill engulfing huge amounts of water before pushing water out through baleen plates which traps edible krill in the water - 3-4 lunges usually necessary - 60,000 kj for typical dive - yield about 5 million kj on average

Explain mutual defense in a society of bluegills

- Each colonial male defends a territory bordered by nest sites of other males - Males cooperate to drive away predators from eggs - Males create territories but if a predator shows up in the area all males in the surrounding area will band together to drive off predator

Explain key reproductive decisions controlled by females

- Egg investment: what materials and how much of them to place in egg - Mate choice: which male or males will be granted right to be sperm donors - Egg fertilization: which sperm will actually fertilize females eggs - Offspring investment: how much maintenance and care goes into each embryo and offspring

Explain environmental differences and behavioural differences

- Environmental differences can cause behavioral differences - Differences between individuals can arise as result of developmental differences stemming from differences either in genes or their environments

Explain how moths respond to relayed messages

- Escape dives of moths pursued by bats are effective one step responses triggered by simple releasing stimuli in the animals environments - Most behaviors involve a coordinated series of muscular responses which cannot result from a single command from a neuron or neural network

Explain the naked mole rat and social behaviour

- Eusocial - Single queen lives in centrally located chamber - Other females do not ovulate and serve as sterile helpers - Most males also sterile helpers - Similar system to ants, bees and wasps

Explain honest signal theory

- Expect male threat signals to be easy for large males to perform but hard for small, weak or unhealthy males - In side blotched lizard the duration of a males display and number of pushups he performs falls after he has been forced to run on a treadmill - Threat displays require energy

Explain different types of polygyny enacted by males

- Female defense polygyny: defend females directly - Resource defense polygyny: defend a territory containing critical resources attractive to females - Scramble competition polygyny: outrace rivals to receptive females - Lek polygyny: defend territories in display area

Explain extra pair mates in fairy wrens

- Female fairy wrens live on a territory with dominant male and a number of auxiliary helpers - In morning female leaves territory and seeks out copulations with dominant males on other territories - Some dominant males on territory do not father any of the offspring of their female - Other males do very well with most of their success due to extra-pair copulations - Females prefer high quality males either at home or elsewhere

Explain the genetic compatibility hypothesis

- Females may engage in polyandry to increase odds of receiving genetically compatible sperm - When complementary genotypes unite high heterozygosity may be result - Norwegian bluethroat extra-pair offspring were more heterozygous than those sired by females social partner - Extra-pair offspring had stronger immune systems

Why is there more parental care by mothers then fathers

- Females more likely to be materinal then males are to be paternal - Ex. polygynous red winged blackbird mothers are obligate care givers to their brood, father are facultative care givers, they provision some broods but not others - Fathers more likely to help care if there are many sons in brood - Reproductive success of brood goes up by 50% when father helps - One explanation is because females already have so much invested in their progeny they have greater incentive to see that their investment is not wasted

Explain the fertility insurance hypothesis

- Females of African tree frog lay clutches of eggs that may be fertilized by 1-12 males - Offspring of polyandrous females more likely to survive then those females that mated to only one male - Females that are restricted to one mate have fewer surviving offspring then females allowed to mate freely

Explain female spotted sandpipers and mating techniques

- Fight over territories that attract males - Females larger and more aggressive then males - Some females achieve higher reproductive success then males - Males take care of kids by themselves - Kids not expensive

Explain the benifits of migration

- Finding a better habitat - Longer days - Rich and more abundant food - Safe area - Scarce predators

Explain fireflies and femme fatale

- Fireflies have species specific flash patterns in order to find eachother to reproduce - Femme fatale respond to mate attracting flashes mimicking the answering calls - Femme fatale lures firefly who she grabs kills and eats - Most of the time light displays will be real and if you are going to reproduce you must follow these signals even though sometimes they will be fake and result in loss of life - Response of male to certain kinds of flashes increases fitness even though costs of responding is small chance of getting captured by femme fatale - Males that avoid signals may live longer but will not reproduce leaving no decedents to carry on cautious behaviour

Explain genetic differences and behavioural differences

- Genetic differences can cause behavioural differences - Differences in behavioural phenotypes have also been linked to heritable genetic differences - Ex. Migratory warblers

Why are songs important to female birds

- Good Genes Hypothesis: Females may benefit by identifying genetically superior males - Male song sparrows with larger repertoires have more children and grandchildren - Direct Benefits: Females may benefit if such males can provide more parental care - sedge warblers song rich males bring more food to nestlings

Explain hatching asynchrony and siblicide in birds

- Hatching asynchrony in birds regulates sibling competition - Later hatched chicks are victims of brood reduction - some species such as red winged blackbirds brood reduction is via non aggressive competitions for food - other species such as egrets, hawks and boobies brood reduction occurs via siblicidal aggression

Explain the adaptive value of song learning

- How do birds benefit from learning song - Song is benifical for attracting mates

Explain predators and foraging behaviour

- If foraging exposes animal to predators it can be expected that foragers will sacrifice short term caloric gain for long term survival - Dugongs feed on sea grasses while trying not to be fed on by tiger sharks - Dugongs use cropping and excavation foraging techniques - Cropping strips leaves from sea grasses, less efficient but safer - Excavation digs out sea grass from substrate, more efficient but leaves them venerable to predators because they are unable to see approaching predators - When tiger sharks are present dungongs spend much less time excavating - Dungongs can also forage in deeper water to avoid sharks - Optimality model that failed to consider the tradeoffs between foraging success and predation risk would fail to predict the dugongs behavior accuratly

Explain how genes are linked to the environment and phenotype

- Individuals phenotype is not determined solely by its genes - Phenotype always depends on interaction between genes and environment - Morphological variation between the spadefood toad tadpoles stems largely from differences in diet

Define letchs

- Letchs are display courts where sexual attraction occurs

Explain migration

- Long distance dispersal that involves movement away from and subsequent return to the same location on an annual basis - Sooty shearwater travel up to 60,000 km in a year, the longest migration known - Migration is advantageous due to longer days in spring in north, less crowding and more available food

Explain the history of migration

- Long distance migration evolved from short distance migration - Migratory species evolved from tropical non-migratory species - Migratory birds moved away from original tropical territory to avoid competition with other birds

Explain ultrasound detecting auditory receptors of a noctuid moth, how moths tell how far the bat is

- Low frequency sound elicits no response from A1 or A2 receptors - Sounds of low or moderate intensity do not generate action potentials in A2 receptor - A1 receptor is distance receptor - A1 receptor fires sooner and more often as sound intensity increases - A1 receptor initially reacts strongly to pulses of ultrasound but then reduces its rate of firing if the stimulus is a constant sound - A2 receptor is proximity warning receptor - If bat is nearby, moth will go into an escape dive usually into the ground, this response is triggered by A2 receptor firing

Explain male monogamy in birds

- Majority of birds males and females form long term partnerships for one or more breeding seasons - Strong support for mate assistance hypothesis - Paternal help increases reproductive success - Monogamy more likely when raising offspring is expensive

Explain the novel environment theory

- Maladaptive response of receiver is caused by a proximate mechanism that was once adaptive but is no longer adaptive - Birds fly towards light but crash into glass wall and die - Marine turtles mistake plastic bags for jellyfish prey with fatal results - Fitness loss

Explain dominance and mating success in male baboons

- Male baboons fight for social status - As result males get bitten about once every six weeks - Injury rate for males is 4 times that for females - Relationship between dominance rank and ability to form consortships with fertile females are strongly positive correlations - Dominant male baboons sired more offspring due to their ability to identify receptive females that were highly likely to conceive and by keeping other males away from fertile females

Explain bed bugs and sexual conflict

- Male bed bugs have evolved sabre like penis that they insert directly into abdomen of mate

Explain territorial defense in chimps

- Male chimps patrol their territory and will attack and kill members of other groups - Effect of this behavior is successful due to expansion of the attacking bands territory - allows your clan to secure more food supplies and increase fitness - Benefits include added feeding grounds and more offspring - Costs include time and energy expended and risk of injury

Explain sensory exploitation in mouthbrooding cichlid

- Male cichlid anal fin has large spots on it that mimic eggs - Female broods eggs and fry in her mouth - When female is spawing she pick up her eggs immediately - If she sees the eggs on the males anal fin she will try and pick them up - male squirts sperm at this time fertilizing eggs in her mouth - sensory bias gives males a chance to fertilize eggs

Why is paternal care cheaper for females?

- Male face lower certainty of paternity especially when internal fertilization occurs - If on average 20% of offspring are sired by other males the costs of paternal care go up and benefit to cost ratio goes down - Males don't want to waste their time and energy on kids that may not be theirs

Explain mate guarding and mate assistance in the cricket

- Male that has acquired mate remains with her in his territory - Solitary territorial males much more likely to survive attack - Males eaten much more when paired because male will allow female to hide in burrow first - Paired females eaten much less since she will hide in burrow first - Benefit of this behavior to males is increased reproductive success

Explain energetic costs of territoriality in yarrow's spiny lizard

- Males given experimental implant of testosterone - Testosterone lizards moved about territory more then controls increasing energetic costs - If high testosterone males received more food they had a much higher survival rate - Energetic costs of increased territorial behavior is reason for high mortality seen in high testosterone males

Explain aphids and social behaviour

- Mother Aphid produces genetically identical offspring by asexual reproduction - Soldiers are sterile, job is to protect sisters from predators - Predator induced polyphenism

Explain neurons in noctuid moths

- Moths A1 and A2 receptors work in the same way that most neurons do - Once triggered an action potential begins near the cell body and travels along the axon toward the next cell in the network - When action potential reaches the end of an axon it may cause the release of a neurotransmitter which is a chemical signal that diffuses across the synapse

Explain triggers for complex behaviours

- Niko Tinbergen and Konrad Lorenz are two founders of ethology - Collaborated on famous experiment that identified a simple stimulus capable to triggering complex behavior - Sensory mechanisms must send information to neuron in the brain that automatically activate an invariant motor program

Explain how neurons control behaviour

- Niko Tinbergen examined link between simple stimuli and complex responses in gulls - Found that baby gulls peck at small sticks with black and white bands in the same way they peck at their parents bill - Adult gull responds to these pecks by regurgitating food - Baby gulls ignore most of the cues provided by the adult and focus on bill coloring

Explain optimal convey size for bobwhites

- Northern bobwhite quail spend winter months in small coveys which range in size from 2-22 individuals - Bobwhites in larger coveys gain antipredator benefit since they don't need to perform as much antipredator vigilance - Living in larger groups elevates costs of competition for food - daily survival rate is at maximum in groups of 11 - Mean daily movement which is a cost is also lowest at groups of 11

Explain the blank slate hypothesis

- Not true - Everything is learned - Traits depend on the environment you grow up in -Genes/genetics have no effect on traits

Explain nutritional stress and song learning

- Nutritional stress early in life has large effects on song learning by male swamp sparrows - Swamp sparrows fed on ad lib and restricted diets showed differences in HVC volume and song learning - Those that have early nutritional stress have impaired ability to copy songs

Explain how motivation affects territorial success

- Older males fight harder and longer to maintain territories - Does not support the hypothesis that territorial winners are in better condition or more physically imposing then losers - Territory owners may value the defending space more then intruders since owner is familiar with space whereas intruder is not - Since reproductive opportunities for older males wane costs of engaging in risky or expensive territory defense also decline - Older males have no future, they have nothing to loose - Younger males still have a future so they don't want to fight too hard or long and risk their life

Explain paternal care in fish and opportunities for polygyny

- Paternal care is more common in species with external fertilization - Male Randall's jawfish holds his mates eggs in his mouth, limiting male to one clutch at a time - Male stickleback cares for nest with a clutch of eggs and can attract additional females which add their eggs to his nest

do male ornaments signal good genes

- Peacocks with larger eyespots on tails produced offspring that survived better

Why do polyphenisms occur

- Polyphenisms are discrete solutions to discrete ecological problems - Any time there are discrete ecological problems to be solved that require different developmental solutions stage may be set for evolution of sophisticated developmental switch mechanisms that enable individuals to develop the phenotype best suited for their particular circumstance

Why maternal care?

- Queller suggests that if parental care is cheaper for females this would tip scale toward greater maternal care

explain the ability to learn

- Requires both genes and environment - Depends on specialized features of the brain which arise developmentally though interplay of genes and environment

Explain sexual selection and parental investment

- Robert Trivers - Parental investment: expenditures of time, energy and risks taken by a parent to help current offspring that reduce parents ability to invest in future offspring - Benefit: parental investment may increase likelihood an existing offspring will survive to reproduce and pass on parental genes to next generation - Cost: parental investment may reduce parents ability to produce future offspring - Males typically excel in mating game and females excel in parental game - Females more likely then males to derive net benefit from taking care of offspring - Offspring that female cares for are extremely likely to carry her genes, males paternity is more uncertain given that females are often inseminated by more then one male

Explain sensory exploitation in spiders

- Sensory exploitation may occur in predatory-prey systems - Predators exploit sensory biases of prey - Bright spots and stripes on spider attract prey to the predator at night - Insects head toward light in nighttime - Bright spots on spider reflect light and attract prey into spiders web - More prey captured in webs at night when spider is present

Explain stimulus filtering

- Sensory receptor system of every animal is designed to screen out some kinds of sensory stimulation while reacting to other kinds of stimulation - Male midshipman produce sounds in the range of 60-120 Hz - auditory receptors are most sensitive to sounds in this range

Explain paperwasps and postponed cooperation

- Several females band together to build and provision a nest - Only one wasp acts as queen while all others are subordinate - 15-35% of helper wasps are completely unrelated to queen so no possibility that subordinates engage in kin directed altruism - subordinate self sacrifice explained by demonstrating that unrelated subordinates derive future reproductive benefit by helping now - Females that help unrelated foundress have chance of inheriting colony from dominant queen upon queens death - Inheritors often acquire a well defended colony with helpers and as a result reproduce more successfully then a solitary nest foundress - Better to be second female in colony rather then trying to establish colony on your own - Solitary nesting females run a high risk of being killed or having their nests destroyed by predators - Subordinates on average have higher direct fitness then solitary nesting females - Often solidary foundresses get no offspring at all because they die by predators - Subordinates that inherit the colony have very high reproductive payoffs

Explain chase away selection theory

- Sexual conflict plays key role - Explanation for the evolution of extreme male ornaments - Starts when male with novel mutation for display trait taps into preexisting sensory bias in females - male may not provide material or genetic benefits of other males, can be called an exploitative male - Exploitative males would spread and would favor female resistance to male exploitation - In turn favor exaggeration of male trait - Decline in female fitness causes decline in attraction to the trait which then causes exaduration in the male trait which will then again further decline the female fitness (repetitive cycle)

Explain defensive benefits of social living in fish

- Striped catfish living on coral reefs can enhance survival by intimidating predators though collective size of massed school - Schools of fish look like one large fish which deters predators from attacking

Explain the development of queen bees

- To make a queen workers feed larvae royal jelly - Royal jelly is a protein ROYALACTIN that triggers gene development - gene-environment interaction - Bees early diet effect if they will develop into a queen

How do moths tell the location of the bat

- When bat is to one side of the moth the A1 receptor on the side closer to the bat fires sooner and more often than the shielded A1 receptor on other side - If bat is directly behind the moth there will be equal stimulation of the left and right ear - When a bat is above the moth activity in the A1 receptor fluctuates in synchrony with the moths wingbeats - A1 cell activity is much higher when the moth has its wings up rather then down if the bat is above the moth

Explain scramble competition polygyny

- When females are widely dispersed defending mating territory is usually uneconomic - Males may scramble to find receptive females before other males do - thirteen-lined ground squirrels First male to find an estrous female and copulate with her will father 75% of offspring, known as first male advantage - Selects for spatial learning ability - Remember locations of females that are about to become sexually receptive - Explosive breeding assemblage occurs in species with highly compressed breeding season - Males need to hurry and get as many matings as possible in short time that females are receptive - Male wood frog will grasp female that he has found before rival males

Explain indirect fitness

- a measure of the genetic success of an altruistic individual based on the number of relatives that the altuist helps reproduce that would not otherwise have survived to do so - number of close relatives that you helped survive - can be helpful or harmful

Explain direct fitness

- a measure of the reproductive or genetic success of an individual based on the number of its offspring that live to reproduce - number of kids

Define Adaptive

- act that is reproductively advantageous for individuals

Explain paper wasps

- female foundress wasp begins nest - daughters she has begun to rear in brood cells of nest will help produce more offspring in the future - foundress wasp creates a workforce of offspring

Is infanticide adaptive

- infanticidal males are behaving adaptively if they themselves are not seriously injured by mother and if mothers come into estrus and mate with killer males

What is the group selection explaination for infanticide

- infanticide is good for the group, thins out herd - ex. first salmon sweeping out sand and sacrificing themselves for later salmon since sand suffocates eggs - logic falls down if you are killing your own offspring since you are taking out your own genes from the gene pool

Explain behavioural strategy

- inherited behaviour pattern that is in competition with other hereditarily different behaviour patterns in ways that have the potenital to affect an individuals inclusive fitness - ex. willingness of individuals to assist close relatives even though their help reduces their direct fitness

Explain avalible prey vs prey selected in oystercatchers

- mainly select intermediate sized mussles and avoid large and small mussels - Ignore small mussels because they give a net calorie loss - Model A measures profitability by the energy present in a mussel of a given size, bigger mussels are better - cannot open all large mussels and waste time and energy before abandoning them - Model B incorporates the costs of abandoned mussels showing that smaller mussels are more profitable - avoid barnacle encrusted mussels, larger mussels are more likely to have barnacles which makes them impossible to open

Explain mice infanticide

- male mice infanticidal - male mice will not be fooled if female is already pregnant and gives birth to a child that is not the males own - gestation period is 21 days - if baby shows up before 21 days after new male has taken over the mouse will be infanticidal towards it

Explain lek polygyny in Topi

- males in central positions at leks mate with more females per capita then males forced to peripheral sites - Older males usually occupy the center of lek

Explain the variation requirement for natural selection

- members of a species differ in phenotype, morphology or behavior - alternative forms within a species are forced into unconscious competition - genes can be present in different forms called alleles, alleles that contribute to the development of traits that increase individual reproductive success will become more common over time, alleles associated with reproductive failure will eventually disappear

Explain the cortical sensory map of the star nosed mole

- most important appendages are the ones closest to the mouth, #11 - objects further away from the mouth get less attention

Explain monogamous males and polyandrous females in jacanas

- polyandrous jacanas females fight for territories that can accommodate several males - Males forced to share reproductive output of female with other members of her harem, they may not be the fathers of the females eggs they receive

Explain monogamy and the origin of eusociality by kin selection

- polyandry has evolved independently - ancestral species of different eusocial groups in every case are monogamous - necessary for sisters to be unusually closely related and sterile workers - eusociality began with monogamous mating systems

Define fitness benefit

- positive effects of trait on reproductive and genetic success

define illegitimate receiver

- predators that take advantage of acoustical, visual and pheromonal signals provided by their prey

Explain helpers at the nest and calculations of inclusive fitness

- primary helpers - secondary helpers - delayers - Helpers are all male because there is excess of males in population and have hard time finding mates - Direct and indirect selection plays role in evolution of helping - Some helpers inherit natal territory which is a direct fitness benefit - Helping behavior is more likely if it is difficult to find your own breeding territory - Helpers derive indirect fitness benefits if they help parents raise more offspring then they would otherwise by reducing parental workload - Enable breeding mother to make lighter eggs that contain significantly less fat and protein then those laid by breeding female without helpers - By cutting back on egg investments females with helpers may live longer and have more lifetime opportunities to reproduce - Half siblings r = 0.25 - Full siblings r = 0.5 - Relatedness between 0.5 and 0.25 because parents vary - F1 = indirect fitness for only primary helpers because only primary helpers are related in any way to offspring - O = base value of how many offspring are usually produced - Primary helpers do best with inclusive fitness = f1 + f2 - Secondary helpers do best with direct fitness = f2

Explain coefficient of relatedness

- probability that an alleles in one individual is present in another because both individuals have inherited it from a recent common ancestor - if close relatives aid one another then any alleles they share with other family members may survive better causing those alleles to increase in frequency

Explain the hotspot hypothesis

- sage grouse most leks are on areas where there are high densities of females - Evidence against hotspot hypothesis in Kafue lechwe, leks are not located in areas of highest female density - Peacocks tend to congregate near spots where females are feeding - fallow deer logging altered paths of female deer, deer changed location of their leks accordingly

What is a weakness to group selection

- self sacrificing behaviour is vulnerable to cheaters - cheating will spread within altruistic groups

Explain social anmesia and loss of a single gene

- social amnesia is related to loss of a single gene - knockout male mouse that lacks functional Oxt gene carefully inspects same female every time she is reintroduced into his cage - male with typical genotype shows less and less interest in a female that he has inspected previously - Oxt knockouts cannot produce oxytocin and males cant remember females with whom they interact

Explain resource defense polygyny

- species where females do not live together, male may become polygynous if he can control rich patch of resources that females visit - Ex. Black-winged damselflies, cichlid fish, Australian antlered fly - Males of Austrialian antlered fly compete for possession of egg-laying sites that can be found only on certain species of recently fallen trees - In African cichlid a territorial male brings a shell to his midden, the more shells the more nest sites are avalible for female use

Explain direct selection

- the process of natural selection that occurs when hereditary distinct individuals differ in the number of surviving offspring they produced or the number of genes they pass on to subsequent generations - how many kids you have - more offspring is better - passing on genes from your own personal reproduction

Explain group selection

- the process that occurs when groups differ in their collective attributes and the differences affect the survival chances of groups - generally fails as an explanation for altruism due to cheaters

Explain the neural control of sonic muscles in Plainfin midshipman fish

- two clusters called conic motor nuclei consist of 2000 neurons each - next to these clusters lies a sheet of pacemaker neurons that adjusts activity of sonic motor neurons - pacemaker neurons are a multicellular central pattern generator

Explain tiger salamanders and polyphenisms

- two forms - Typical form feeds on small invertebrates and grows more slowly than cannibal form - Cannibals have broader heads and larger teeth than insect eating form - developmental switch is triggered to shift from typical to cannibal morph - Cannibals are favoured at high densities, size asymmetry, when there are more unrelated individuals

Explain policing actions in insects

- workers and queen monitor reproductive behaviour of others - eggs laid by individuals other then queen will be eaten by other colony members - queen pheromones repress worker reproduction - queen can detect when worker has matured ovaries, queen will smear worker with pheromones that will tell other workers to jail mature worker preventing them from reproducing - percentage of reproducing workers in nests of social wasps decreases as effectiveness in which fellow workers destroy eggs increases - workers have little chance of boosting inclusive fitness directly so indirect route is superior

Is behaviour affected by natural selection

- yes - behaviour no different then phenotypic trait

Does natural selection apply to humans

- yes - height is heritable

What are the three steps to a fixed action pattern

1. The sign stimulus/releaser activates the.. 2. Innate releasing mechanism that induces a... 3. Fixed action pattern

Explain average relatedness in haplodiploid insects

If queen mates with only one male: - mother and daughter = 50% - mother and son = 50% - sister and sister = 75%, 100% of dads genes and 50% of moms genes - sister and brother = 25%, 0% of dads genes and 50% of moms genes - sister and brother relatedness is low since brothers dont have any parental genes and the probability that maternal genes are the same is only 25%

Explain kin discrimination in beldings ground squirrels

Newborn offspring of captive females were switched around to create four classes of individuals - Siblings reared apart - Siblings reared together - Nonsibilings reared apart - Nonsibilings reared together - After weaning pairs of individuals were placed together in an arena and allowed to interact - Sisters reared apart displayed significantly less aggression toward eachother than other combinations of siblings reared apart which were as aggressive to eachother when they met in an experimental arena as nonsibilings reared apart - Indicates that even if sisters are not reared together they can recognized eachother as kin

Was Charles Darwin correct in his theory on infanticide

No he was wrong

Explain the neural network of a moth

- A1 and A2 receptor cells are linked to relay cells called interneurons - Interneurons have action potentials that can change the activity of other cells in the moths thoracic ganglia - Cells in thoracic ganglia communicate with motor neurons that control wing muscles - Moths behavior is product of an integrated series of chemical and biophysical changes in a network of cells - Specific neuron differ greatly in their exact functions - A1 and A2 receptors are specialized for detection of ultrasonic stimuli

Explain frequency dependent selection

- Acts on hereditary traits - Frequency of fitness of one phenotype lowers as it becomes more common whereas the opposite phenotype fitness will increase - Best for both phenotypes is to be in 50/50 frequency - When sitters are common, rovers will do well and increase in frequency - When rovers are common, sitters will do well and increase in frequency

explain deception and illegitimate signalers

- Adaptation need not be perfect but must contribute more to fitness on average then alternative traits - Illegitimate signalers: reduce but do not eliminate the net fitness benefits of participating in a generally advantageous communication system - usually deceptive signaler of one species exploits receiver of another - If adaptationist hypothesis is correct then deception by an illegitimate signaler should exploit a response that has a clear adaptive value under most circumstances

Explain why a trait may not be perfectly adaptive

- Adaptive value of a trait is the contribution it makes to an individuals inclusive fitness - Not every trait has adaptive value - Some traits persist when they no longer are adaptive - Some traits are due to genes that have both positive and negative value - Some traits are slow to develop - Mutations, pleiotrophy and coevolution all constrain the adaptive value of traits

Explain aggression assocated with female enforced monogamy

- Aggression by breeding female towards other females - Emerald coral goby - Dominant female on males territory spends time repelling other females from territory and her male - Females evict other female intruders that are in territory especially if intruders are large, mature individuals capable of reproducing - Dominant females will evict large mature females almost all of the time, they are a large threat - Dominant female is not so concerned with immature small females

Explain alarm calls and kin selection

- Alarm call alerts nearby ground squirrels of nearby predator - Squirrels that give alarm call are more likely to be tracked down and killed - Females with relatives nearby are more then twice as likely as males to give alarm call because females are more closely related to the colony then males - Males disperse from home whereas females live in kin groups - Since callers are more likely to be killed by predators they pay a survival/reproductive cost - Cost is offset by increase in survival of callers offspring which would boost callers direct fitness - Adult females with relatives other then direct offspring living nearby were also significantly more likely to sound an alarm call then were females without relatives nearby - helps relatives other then offspring survive to pass on shared genes resulting in indirect fitness gains - Direct and indirect selection contribute to maintenance of alarm calling behavior

Explain sensory exploitation in swordtails

- Alexandra Basolo - Current preference for a colorful elongate swordtail could have originated because females happened by chance to be attracted to a stimuli offered by a longer more colorful tail of a mutant male - Ancestor of modern swordtails was swordless, swordtail is therefore a derived characteristic - Modern day platyfishes lack sword yet female platyfishes prefer males with artificially added swordtails indicating a preexisting preference for swordtails - Sensory bias preceded the origin of the swordtail

Explain warning coloration and toxins

- Animals that are chemically defended typically are conspicuous in appearance and behavior - Monarch butterflies that feed on toxic milkweeds and store toxins in bodies and wings - Blister beetles have blood laced with cantharidin which is a highly toxic chemical

Explain the effect of predation risk on ideal free distribution

- Animals will move further away from predator into others habitats - Feeding rate goes down but individuals are not at risk of predator - How much food are you willing to give up in order for safety

Explain possible hypothesis for stotting behaviour

- Antiambush hypothesis: gazelles stot to look ahead for predators, predicts stotting will not occur in short grass savanna, will only stot in tall grass or mixed grass and shrub habitats where predator detection could be improved by jumping into air Gazelles feeding in short grass habitats do stot so antiambush hypothesis rejected - Alarm signal hypothesis: stotting warns conspecifics, particularly offspring that a predator is near - Social Cohesion Hypothesis: enables gazelles to form groups and flee in a coordinated manner, harder for predators to single out a single individual, reduces likelihood that anyone will be singled out by predator and killed - Stotting gazelles orient rump patch to predator not other gazelles which eliminates social cohesion hypothesis if exposing rump patch is intended to attract other gazelles - Confusion Effect Hypothesis: by stotting, individuals in a fleeing herd might confuse and distract a following predator, keeping it from focusing on one animal - Solitary gazelles stot when cheetah approaches, rules out alarm signal hypothesis and confusion effect hypothesis - Pursuit Deterrence Hypothesis: stotting announces to predator that it has been spotted and the individual is in excellent condition, don't bother chasing me - Based on these observations the most likely hypothesis is the signal of unprofitability hypothesis - In order for stotting to be an evolved communication system the signaler/gazelle and receiver/predator must both benefit - Stotting is an honest signal indicating the stotter will be hard to capture which makes it advantageous for predator to accept attack deterrence signal to avoid wasting energy and time

Explain camouflage

- Antipredator strategy often used by solitary animals - Cryptic coloration depends on background selection - Body orientation also important - Costs include time and energy individuals spend in finding right background and time spent immobile during day - Some camouflaged insects do things to make themselves conspicuous, only when under attack, sounds they produce often frighten enemies startling them into retreat

Explain discriminating parental care

- Raising of offspring of non kin is wasted parental investment - Expect parents to discriminate between kin and non kin - Mexican free tailed bat mothers recognize their pups despite fact that they leave their infants in a dense mass of baby bats when they leave their caves to forage outside, when female returns she can relocate her baby amoung thousands of individuals - Female goldeneye ducks will escort brood of ducklings some of whome came from other broods, could be because goldeneye ducks are precocial

Explain male monogamy in mammals

- Rare - Sexual selection theory suggests that male mammals which cannot become pregnant and do not offer milk to infants should usually try to be polygynous, often are

Explain male assistance hypothesis in mammals

- Rare Male mammals that offer paternal care should tend to be monogamous - Male Djungarian hamsters are monogamous, help deliver partners pups - California mice monogamous, pairs rear larger litters then females on their own - Mean number of offspring reared by female mice falls sharply in absence of helpful male partner - Litter sizes at birth are mainly the same regardless of male presence but much more offspring survive to emerge from nest when male is present to help raise kids - Large benefit to males by remaining monogamous and helping raise kids

Explain the operational sex ratio

- Ratio of sexual receptive males to receptive females - Females who have already mated have nothing to gain by copulating again - means there are typically many fewer sexually active females then males - Male biased operational sex ratio

Explain self sacrificing communication

- Ravens seem to have nothing to gain by calling loudly and attracting more consumers to food that could last most of the winter if not shared - Yelling occurred only when 3 or more ravens were present not with only 1-2 - Yelling is used to overwhelm resident pair - When raven yells the benefits of personal access to the food should outweigh the costs of yelling and the risk of attack by the resident ravens - Yelling and response of yelling have properties of adaptations because these actions can yield net fitness benefits to signaler and receivers Gives following predictions: - Resident territory owners should never yell - Nonresident ravens should yell - Yelling should facilitate a mass assault by nonresident ravens - Resident pairs should be unable to repel a communal assault - Food should be eaten either by resident pair alone or by mob of ravens

Explain the differences in parental care between north and south american birds

- Reactions of birds to predatory threats to themselves and their offspring should vary in relation to annual mortality rate of adults - Shorter lived North American birds predicted to do more to reduce risks to their offspring since they will most likely not have another opportunity to reproduce - Longer lived South American birds predicted to do more to promote their own survival and less likely to take risks to keep their offspring safe because they will live for more breeding seasons and will have more opportunities to reproduce - Rate at which parents feed their nestlings falls more sharply in north American birds then south American birds in response to apparent risk of nest predation - North American birds will stop feeding when nesting predator is present to protect their offspring - Rate at which parents feed their nestlings fall more sharply in south American birds then in north American birds after their parents see a hawk capable of killing adults

Explain studs and duds in relation to genetic compatibility hypothesis

- Reduction of embryo deaths is one reason why female pseudoscorpions mate with several males, refuse to mate with same male twice, Coolidge effect - Polyandrious females have fewer failed embryos and more surviving offspring to nymp stage then monogamous females - Some males sperm were much better match for females reproductive tract then others - Appears to be prescreening before fertilization

Explain releasers and releasing mechanisms

- Releaser for behavior is the stimulus - Innate releasing mechanism is a pathway in the brain which is triggered by the stimulus/releaser - Certain sensory messages from the releaser (red dot on bill of adult gull) are processed by innate releasing mechanisms (neuronal clusters) higher in the nervous system leading to motor commands that control a fixed action pattern - Preprogramed series of movements that constitiute an adaptive reaction to the releasing stimulus

Explain genetic and behavioural differences in fruit flies

- Representative tracks made by sitter and rover phenotypes feeding in a petri dish - Influences neuronal activity in brain - When adult female flies of sitter strain mate with male flies of rover strain their offspring almost all exhibit rover phenotype - When flies from F1 generation interbreed their offspring are composed of rovers and sitters in 3:1 ratio - Rover gene has advantage in large density populations - Sitter gene has advantage in low density populations

Explain habitat selection

- Reproductive success is often strongly linked to habitat type and quality - Many animals have evolved strong habitat preferences for some places over others - Animals preferred habitat is the one where its breeding success is greatest - If habitat preferences are adaptive then individuals that are able to fulfill their preferences ought to leave more descendants then those unable to acquire prime real estate

Explain the polygyny threshold model

- Resource level at which female can gain more by mating with polygynist on a good territory then by pairing off with single male on resource poor or predator vulnerable territory - Tested experimentally in red winged blackbirds by Stanislav Pribil and Bill Searcy - Females chose to be the second female on high quality territory rather then the first female on low quality territory

Explain ways in which males influence female reproduction

- Resources transferred to female: may influence egg investment, mate choice or egg fertilization decisions by female - Elaborate courtshop: may influence mate choice or egg fertilization decisions by female - Sexual coercion: may overcome female preferences for other males - Infanticide: may overcome female decisions about offspring investment

Explain the two hereditary forms of african cichlid fish

- Right jawed and left jawed have asymmetrical mouths that are used to snach scales from the left and right sides - When right jawed fish predominate prey get better at avoiding them and left jawed fish gain an advantage - Frequency of right and left jawed fish oscillates - frequency dependent selection

Explain the reciprocity hypothesis

- Robert Trivers - Cooperation could evolve as reciprocal altruism - Helped individuals eventually return the favors they receive - Helpers are not sacrificing direct fitness over the long haul - If the initial direct fitness cost of helping is modest but delayed direct fitness benefit from receiving returned favor is greater then selection can favor being helpful in the first case

Is quality of territory or helpers at the nest the important factor

- Ron Mumme proposed that differences in number of progeny reared by parents with and without helpers might be due to differences in territories occupied by the two groups of individuals - Experimentally removed helpers from some randomly selected breeding pairs - Many less offspring when helpers are removed - Shows that helpers actually help, not territory

Explain proximate basis of stimulus filtering in star nosed mole

- Same sort of filtering of information occurs in central nervous system - Star nosed mole lives in wet marshy soil where it hunts for earthworms - cant see in its burrows and its eyes are greatly reduced in size - ignores visual information, relies on tactile information - Pink nose is used as tactile apparatus - 22 appendages of star nose are covered with thousands of Eimer's organs - each organ contain a variety of specialized sensory cells that respond to mechanical deformation of the skin above them - devotes much more somatosensotry cortex to processing inputs from its nose and forelimbs than it does to processing those coming from receptors in other parts of its body

Explain the principle of imperfection

- Sensory exploitation hypothesis derived from argument that what has already evolved influences what kinds of additional changes are likely - Selection does not start from scratch but instead acts on what already exists - Whiptail lizards are asexual - Female may be courted and mounted by another female - Females subjected to this treatment are much more likely to produce eggs - Effect of courtship is due to the fact that this species is derived from sexual ancestors

Explain single gene effects on development

- Single gene differences could in theory produce large behavioral differences between individuals

Explain the escape behaviour of the sea slug

- Slugs dorsal muscles are maximally contracted drawing the slugs head and tail together - Ventrical muscles will soon contract and the slug will thrash away - Sea slug Tritonia diomedea engages in escape behavior when it encounters sea star - Thrashes back and forth and with luck avoids being eaten - Requires 2-20 alternating bends involving contraction of sheet muscles on back followed by contraction of muscles on belly - Dorsal and ventrical muscles are under the control of motor neurons - Dorsla flexion neurons are active when the animal is being bent into a U - Ventrical flexion neuron produces a pulse of action potentials that turn the slug into an inverted U - Simple neural network headed by the dorsla ramp interneurons that interacts with the ventrical flexion neuron and dorsal flexion neurons imposes order on the activity of the motor neurons that control the dorsal and ventral flexion muscles means this mechanism qualifies as a central pattern generator

Explain alternative mating tactics for subordinant individuals

- Sneaking in Salmon: jacks dont fight with hooknoses, they attempt to sneak fertilizations - Forming partnerships with other males: low ranking males may band together with other low ranking makes to oppose higher ranking male - Friendships with Female Baboons: low ranking males can produce friendships with fertile females and once they have shown their willingness to defend female and her offspring female will seek out low ranking baboon when she is in estrous - Retaining Sperm: little iguanas release sperm but retain it prior to attempting to mate with female enabling iguana to release sperm immediately after mounting female before larger iguana can pull him off

Explain the mate guarding hypothesis

- Prairie voles - If female remains receptive after mating, males that prevent partner from accepting sperm from other males could leave more descendants by mate guarding rather then trying to seek new partners - If male leaves while female is fertile, male risks another male coming along and fertilizing females eggs - If male leaves while kids are around, male risks another male coming along and killing kids

explain predation risks and bird calls

- Predation risks have shaped begging calls of birds - Ground nesting birds more exposed to predators then tree nesting birds - Nestlings stop begging when parent calls alarm to indicate a predator is nearby - Lower frequency is more detectable - Ground nesting birds have higher frequency calls that aren't as detectable, this is because they need to be more careful of predators

Explain home range

- Predict coexistence on an undefended living space or home range should evolve when benefits of owning a valuable space do not outweigh costs of territoriality - Males will often live together in harmony when females are not sexually active - Males become aggressive when females are ready to mate - Adaptive capacity of individuals to adjust their aggressiveness up or down in relation to costs and benefits of territoriality

Explain reciprocity in primates

- Primates groom one another - Females will often groom fur of a male that will return the favor by keeping other males from sexually harassing female groomers

Explain song compeition in starlings

- RA can respond to social environment of the bird - Keith Sockmann found that in starlings the RA is the only song control nucleus that grows substantially in males that are exposed to high quality/longer songs of other males for a week - RA can respond to social environment of the bird - When bird hears high quality songs, RA grows helping bird produce a better song - Birds that produce longer/higher quality song have larger RA

Explain brood parasitism and size

- brood parasites take advantage of unrelated species much smaller than they are - Brood parasite nestlings that are larger than host nestlings are more likely to be fed, form of sensory exploitation that works to parasites advantage - size of brood parasite nestling relative to its host species determines its survival chances - Larger great tit nestlings survived well when transferred to nests of smaller blue tits, whereas blue tits did poorly in great tit nests

explain subdews and deception

Exude droplets that look like sugary fluids but are actually sticky glues that trap insects allowing plant to eat them

Explain alternative mating tactics in scoprionflies

Three distinct mating tactics: - Large Dominant males: defend dead insects that attract females - Medium sized males: secrete saliva on leaves and wait for females to consume nutritional gift - Small Males: Forced copulation - Posses conditional strategies that enable them to select one of three options based on social standing - Males will switch to tactic that yields higher reproductive success if social conditions make switch possible

What do females gain from polyandry

Beneficial to females to have two or more partners performing most of the paternal care on her behalf

Is social and genetic monogamy the same?

no - Social monogamy by males often coexists with genetic polyandry by mates

Explain hearing and song learning in birds

- First sons hearing was intact and was able to copy fathers song - Second son was experimentally deafened and he never sang typical zebra finch song - Sons develop songs of their fathers by listening to their father sing

Explain Plainfin midshipman

- Fish that nest under rocks in intertidal zones - Males sing to attract females - Females lay eggs in den and males guard them - air bladder is sandwiched between layers of sonic muscles, vibrate and produces singing - alternative mating strategies - males have sperm with two tails allowing satellite males sperm to swim to the eggs from large distances - biolumenesent

Explain gene expression and proximate control of the zebra finch song system

- As zebra finches attempt to match a tutors song the activity of ZENK gene rapidly increases in certain song control neurons - When zebra finch listens to itself sing it generates sensory feedback that activates ZENK gene in certain cells, appears to produce a protein that alters neural circuits that controls finch song - As finch gets closer and closer to singing an accurate copy of a tutor song ZENK gene activity falls in as particular brain region - Changes in genetic activity in response to key environmnetnal stimuli translate into changes in neurophysiological mechanism that control the learning process, affects neurotransmitters that cross synapses - Transcription factor - Wires neural networks in the brain - Activity of ZENK gene falls as individual gets closer to the recorded copy in its brain until the activity of the gene is at zero once the produced version of the song is the exact match of the recorded version

Explain the role of the avpr1a gene in praire voles

- Avpr1a gene increases abundance of vasopressin receptors in male prairie voles brain - Montane voles are polygynous and have different version of avpr1a gene and different distribution of the receptor - Prairie voles with extra copies of avpr1a gene spent even more time with a familiar female in preference to a strange female - Familiar partners were not preferred by males that received the avpr1a gene in caudate putament region of the brain or by males that received a different gene - Prairie voles spend more time with partner when added copies of avpr1a gene are placed in ventral pallidum - Differences in avpr1a genes causes differences in mating behaviours in prarie and montane voles - More monogamous when added avpr1a gene in ventral pallidum - More polygenous when avpr1a gene is placed in different areas of brain - Reduced monogamous behavior when a different gene is placed in venteral pallidum - Proximate level of understanding

Explain simple stimuli and male bee nervous system

- Bees nervous system responds to simple operating rules - When sexually active male grasps an object about the size of a female the sensory signals generated by its touch receptors translate into complex series of muscle commands - Male bees encountering objects that are the size and shape of a female bee triggers a behaviour

Explain genes and the environment on the ability to learn

- Bees show behavior is not purely genetically determined - Behavior expressed is conditional upon the developmental environment - DNA is both inherited and environmentally responsive - Genes dictate what we are capable of learning and what we are not capable of learning - Learning requires both genes and environment - Classic example of the circumscribed nature of learning is imprinting

Explain adaptations

- Behavioural ecologists study traits they believe are adaptations - Test specific hypothesis about possible adaptive value/contribution to fitness of the characteristic - hereditary trait that has spread or is spreading by natural selection and has replaced or is replacing any alternative traits in the species - has better fitness-benefit to fitness-cost ratio then alternative forms of trait - Selection does not produce perfect traits, cannot create best of all possible genes, has to wait for mutations to occur

Explain the hotshot hypothesis

- Being around alpha male benefits subordinate males - Subordinate males hang around attractive alpha male and get more copulations due to this - marine iguanas territory with greatest number of mating shifted over years due to fact that advantageous body sizes change from year to year due to food supply and environmental changes, consistant with hotshot hypothesis

Explain how body condition affects migratory route

- Birds with low fat reserve take overland migration where breaks and refueling can occur - Birds with high fat reserves take over water direct route which is shorter but does not enable individual to take any breaks - Advantage of flying over the ocean is little predators

Explain spatial learning

- Black capped chickadees spent much more time at sites in an aviary where they had stored food 24 hours previously/hoard sites than they had spent during their initial exposure to those sites - Chickadees made many more visits to hoard sites than to other site evidently because they remembered storing food there - Clarks nutcrackers may scatter as many as 33000 seeds in up to 5000 caches that may be as far as 25 km from the harvest site - Store seeds in difficult to find places so other birds will not steal stored seeds - Memory of seed locations stored for 6-9 months

Explain camouflage in the white and black moths

- Black form of moth initially was very rare but almost completely replaced the white moths as the industrial revolution occurred - Industrial soot darkened forests making white moths more conspicuous to prey - White allele was consumed - Often settle within shaded patches below branches which is an adaptation as they are more likely to be overlooked by predators in this area

Explain genes and worker job behaviours in bees

- Both genes and environment contribute to development of foraging behavior in honey bee - Tasks adopted by worker bees are linked to their age - Honeybees go through distinct developmental stage during course of their life, starting will cleaning brood cells and ending with foraging - Juvenile hormone dictates what job bee will perform - Older high juvenile hormone bees produce ethyl oleate that they transfer to younger bees to suppress juvenile hormone in these young bees which will prevent them from moving up line of jobs - Hormone is responsive to the social environment

Explain the dear enemy effect

- Boundary disputes between territory owners usually gets resolved over time with result that neighbors treat familiar rivals as dear enemies - Familiar neighbors may be able to approach closer and are not chased as far during disputes - Organisms that inhabit the same area year after year become dear enemies - Familiarity with a dear enemy reduces time and energy in encounters with familiar neighbors - Experiments replacing familiar neighbors with new individuals show the costs of territory defense rise sharply

Explain chase away selection in fruit flies

- Transfer chemical along with sperm that increase delay in remating in partner - Transfer a protein that boosts male fertilization success but shortens lives of females

Explain the tungara frog and fringe-lipped bats

- Calling male frogs may attract bats an illegimate receiver - Prey lose fitness by having their messages reach wrong target - When evolved communication system contributes to fitness of legitimate signalers and legitimate receivers system can be exploited by outsiders - when predators are eavesdropping they impose costs on legitimate signalers nearby - If costs are very high signaling will be eliminated - If reproductive costs do not exceed the benefits of signaling legitimate signalers will persist - Frogs that don't call may live longer but they will be at reproductive disadvantage - Females prefer whine and chuck, but more likely to attract predators - When bat is present frogs will ommit chuck to avoid getting caught by bat if in small group - Bats can hear chuck - Chuck defers other males due to dilution effect since if there are many other frogs present male producing chuck is less likely to be caught by bat - Males in large groups are more likely to produce whine-chuck calls - Chuck allows frog to stand out from a crowd of males, competition drives you to do more dangerous things

Explain the pathway to sound production in midshipman fish

- Cerebellum and mesencephalon --> Ventral meduallary nucleus --> Pacemaker neurons --> Sonic motor nucleus --> Sonic muscles - Cerebellum and mesencephalon receives auditory input - Ventral medullary nucleus is the vocal pattern generator and starts with the ventral medullary nucleus that receives input from nuclei in the cerebellum and mesencephalon - Pacemaker neurons are the central pattern generator - Sonic motor nucleus innervates the sonic muscles - Sonic muscles drum on swim bladder to produce sound

Explain call distinctiveness and offspring recognition

- Chicks of cliff swallows which are colonial species produce highly structured and distinctive calls helping their parents recognize them - Calls of barn swallow chicks which are a less colonial species are much less structured and more similar - altruistic species parents pay close attention to brood parasitism and have recognition systems to identify their own offspring

Explain policing by the naked mole rat queen

- Chief policewomen shoves other members of colony around inducing high levels of stress in subordinates - Bullying by queen suppresses production of sex hormones, subordinates become incapable of reproducing - Altruism in subordinates occurs because they are forced to forgo reproduction, only options are to leave colony to try and reproduce elsewhere which is very risky or to accept their nonreproductive status and assist queen suffienctly to be permitted to remain within safety of the group - Workers help produce the occasional reproductively capable sibling that will leave home to found a new colony

Explain cost of living in cliff swallows

- Clift swallows nest side by side in colonies - Social Living comes with substantial fitness costs to individuals including growth costs for nestlings -subjected to blood sucking parasitic bugs that feed on babies - Larger the colony the more transient birds that bring more bugs - Larger the colony the higher the infestation rate of parasites - Benefits of nesting in colonies includes improved foraging success - Larger nestling is from an insecticide treated nest - Smaller nestling from nest infested with swallow bugs

Explain sexual selection and sperm competition

- Competition among sperm from different males - Tactics may be used to enhance fertilization success such as produce more or faster sperm or blocking or removing sperm of other males

Explain the prairie vole brain

- Complex evolved mechanism with special features whose operation helps explain vole behavior - Vasopressin is produced in brain following copulation, produces a reward sensation encouraging formation of a long term social bond - Peptide Receptors for vasopressin are found in ventral pallidum, part of brains basal ganglia - When V1a receptors in ventral pallidum are stimulated by vasopressin, they trigger activity in the receptor rich cells - activity affects neural pathways in brain that provide vole with positive feedback for mating behavior linked to pleasure - Vasopressin produced in posterior pituitary which is an extension of the hypothalamus - Mating behavior linked to pleasure - More vasopressin receptors in monogamous species then polygenous species

Explain the removal of rival sperm in some species

- Copulation in black winged damselfly male grasps female with tip of abdomen, female bends over to make contact with partners sperm removing and sperm transferring penis - Penis has lateral horns and spines that enables it to scrub out females sperm storage organ before passing his own sperm to her - Male dunnock pecks at cloaca of partner after finding another male near her, in response she ejects droplet of sperm just received from other male

Explain the costs and benifits of dispersal

- Costs of travel and predation - Advantage of staying where you are is familiarity - In squirrels males searching for a new home go much farther from natal burrows then females - Females are likely to stay at home creating maternal colonies - Benefits of remaining on familiar ground is greater for females then males and contributes to evolution of sex differences in dispersal - Dispersal is an adaptation to avoid inbreeding depression - When two closely related individuals mate they are more likely to express deleterious recessive allele - Inbreeding reduces the fitness of offspring - Females avoid males that were born in their clan making it adaptive for these males to leave to search for unrelated females elsewhere - Male mammals disperse due to competition for mates from older stronger rivals - Makes sense to move away from rivals one cannot subdue

Explain sexual selection

- Darwins solution to why extraordinarily extravagant courtship behaviors and ornaments evolved - Many courtship behaviors and ornaments make it likely for males to die young - Natural selection eliminates males that die while trying to find females to mate with - Sexual selection helps explain why males have evolved traits that lower their survival chances - Extravagant traits are favored in sexual selection given that these attributes help male gain advantage over other males in acquiring mates - Ornamented males may intimidate rivals and may be more attractive to females - If males lived shorter lives but reproduced more then ornaments, displays and behaviors that reduced longevity can spread over time

Explain the cognitive ability in bower builders

- Mating success is higher for birds with higher cognitive ability Males tested on six different cognitive tasks - Remove clear barrier covering target objects - Conceal undesirable objects - Miometic repertoire size - Stick placement skill - Flexible response to novel bower manipulation - Use behavioral tool to create symmetric bowers

Explain great herons and territoriality

- Defend feeding territories - Setting up feeding territories is essential to survive winter - In winter there are only a few places where there are holes in the ice, without securing one of these spots animal will be unable to get food over winter and die - Fish come up to holes in the ice because that area has best oxygenated water - Territorial battles can involve extreme aggression - During winter Herons defend individual feeding territories but during breeding season become social since food is plentiful - Attempts to defend a territory during breeding season becomes futile due to density of other foragers - Territoriality in summer would be a fitness cost

Explain dietary specialists and taste aversions

- Dietary specialists concentrate on one or a few safe foods - Ex. Vampire bats are specialists, insect eating bats are generalist - Vampire bats cannot form learned taste aversions - Vampire bats continued to consume flavoured fluid even if immediately after accepting the substance they were injected with toxin - Vampire bats are unable to learn from injected toxin and nausea because they are dietary specialists, they don't have anything else to eat so they cannot avoid food that makes them sick, they cannot learn - Insect eating bat species completely rejected dietary item when it was combined with injection of toxin no matter whether this was done immediately after feeding or after delay - Incestivorous bats can avoid toxic foods because they are generalists and can find other food items that are not toxic, they can learn

Explain the dialets in bird song

- Different populations of the same bird may have different song dialets - Ex. White-crowned sparrows living in different geographic areas have song dialects that are relatively stable across time - White crowned dialects are learned by listening to local males

Explain game theory

- Each player chooses between two or more strategies - For every set of choices each player gets a specific payoff - Applies when the payoff to you depends on what someone else does in the same game - Rock paper scissors - Sneaking vs fighting in Pacific salmon - Orange yellow blue male side blotched lizards - Rovers vs sitters in fruit flies - Left vs right mouthed cichlids

Explain incubation and hatching success for monogamy

- Eggs stay at constant 35 C incubation temperature when both parents help - Eggs incubated by female only are colder because female must leave to feed allowing eggs to get cold - More constant incubation temperatures with two parents gives higher hatching success (97%) - Bouncing around of incubation temperatures with only one parent incubating is difficult for embryos and gives lower hatching success (75%)

Explain isopods and sexual conflict

- Either larger female or smaller male may kill and consume its partner - Egg production is correlated with female size - Both males and female compete for food

Explain costs of territoriality

- Energetic costs - Risk of injury - High testosterone levels which promote territorial defense may impair immune function or reduce parental care - An impaired immune system leaves individual venerable to pathogens which accounts for higher mortality rate in males

Explain criticisms of optimal foraging theory

- Energy gain alone may be a poor measure of fitness - Choose prey that tends to provide maximum caloric benefit in relation to time spent foraging - Ignores other important considerations such as critical or limiting nutrients, predation risk during foraging, and injuries from consuming prey - Energy maximization may not always be best policy

Explain how flying in V formation reduced the costs of migratory flight

- Energy saver - Can shave 11-14% of flight costs by taking advantage of updrafts from wingtips of birds in front - Catch thermals in morning for free and will glide for kilometers taking advantage of the free energy - First bird in formation expends a lot of energy, eventually leading bird will fall back and switch off with another bird

Why do male water bugs do all the work?

- Exclusive paternal care is rare among vertebrates and invertebrates - Giant water bugs are exception - some genera females glue eggs directly to males back - other males take care of eggs glued to stems of aquatic vegetation - genus Lethocerus males stand watch over eggs their mates lay on vegetation - Belostomid eggs are very large and require lots of oxygen to sustain high metabolic rates during development - Most aquatic insects lay smaller eggs in water - Belostomids solve problem by laying eggs out of water but this raises problem of drying out - To solve drying out problem males brood eggs to keep them from drying out - Male water bugs with one clutch of eggs can continue to advertise for more females - may be attractive, advertising his ability to take care of kids - Costs of care are greater for females given the high costs of egg production - Need large eggs because they need to reach large adult size

Explain the great tit alarm calls

- Exploitation by illegitimate receiver may explain difference between mobbing and seet call - Mobbing call4.5 kHz can he beard by hawk but is telling hawk that it has been seen, lower frequency - Seet call 7kHz is quiet, cannot be heard by hawk, tells other birds that a hawk is nearby, higher frequency - Seet alarm call is outside of range that hawks can hear best but inside range that great tits can hear best - Hawks cannot hear seet call unless within 10 m, great tits can hear call 40 m away - Seet call allows great tits to alert family members without giving away their location

Explain game theory and foraging behaviour

- Explores adaptive value - Whenever two or more foraging phenotypes exist question is why hasn't type associated with higher fitness replaced the other over evolutionary time - Individuals using one strategy which works well in one situation may come up short when matched against other individuals using another strategy - Fruit fly larvae exhibit two different genetically based strategies, rovers and sitters - Rovers move about 4 times as far as sitters - Both types of larvae are common in some places - Two phenotypes can coexist indefinitely due to frequency-dependent selection - Best options may change over time depending on frequency of phenotypes in population

Explain the costs of migration

- Extra weight that migrant has to gain to build up energy reserves - Temporary atrophy of reproductive organs - Increase in muscle contraction efficiency - Altered metabolism that enables bird to process stored fats quickly - Physiological changes that make egg laying possible after they arrive on breeding grounds - Flight is energetically costly, migrants risk running out of energy - Risk of encountering predators individual is not familiar with - Expect adaptations to shave flight costs of migration

Explain how the evolutionary theory of sex differences would be tested

- Favor males that compete vigorously with rival for mates and pursue females avidly - Favor females that avoid costs of additional matings after choosing a partner who offers most fitness benefits such as good resources and genes - Differences between sexes in sexual behavior may arise from fundamental differences in parental investment that affect rate at which individuals can produce offspring - One way to test theory is to look for counterexamples to typical pattern of greater maternal investment in offspring - Some species males make contributions other then just sperm to welfare of offspring - In these species expect females to compete for mates showing sex role reversal

Explain the female preference hypothesis

- Female Uganda kob do not aggregate disporprotionaly at leks with large numbers of males - Female attendance at leks proportional to number of males displaying there - As result female to male ratio does not increase as lek size increases - This evidence lets us reject female preference hypothesis - Straight line is evidence against female preference hypothesis, would expect an upwards curve if female preference hypothesis is true

Explain sex differences in the hippocampus of parasitic and nonparasitic birds

- Female cowbirds have larger hippocampus than males, they are brood parasites that must search widely to find nests to parasitize, males do not need to do this - Nonparasitic species don't have this challenge and therefore have smaller hippocampus

Explain the evolution of differences in sex roles

- Female does all incubation of eggs so females need to be well camouflaged because she is venerable while sitting on eggs - Colorful males are very badly camouflaged and are often killed by predators

Explain bird song and developmental history

- Female preferences may also be based on possibility that females can monitor developmental history of the male by measuring whether he is unusually healthy - Male zebra finches with more complex songs have larger than average HVC - Nutritional stress early in life can affect early development - Male song is an indicator of male quality - Higher vocal center is smaller in males with early nutritional stress

Explain sexual conflict in the lekking species

- Female topi attacks male on display grounds after he refuses to mate with her again - Males that become sperm depleted may gain by refusing to mate with every possible copulatory partner - Refusal to mate triggers female aggression

Explain sex role reversal

- Females advertise for mates - long tailed dance fly females fly in swarms where they wait for arrival of gift bearing male - While waiting female inflates abdomen and holds dark hair legs around her body making her look as large as possible - pipefish and seahorses males carry offspring in brood pouch and females engage in aggressive courtships - Large males discriminate against small females - Mormon cricket males give mate edible nuptial gift, a spermatophore - Spermatophore constitutes 25% of males body mass so most males can only mate once - Some females can produce several clutches of eggs but must pursue several males to mate with if all their eggs are to be fertilized - Males refuse to mate with underweight females, heavier females produce more eggs

Do signal receivers have pereferences for signal that neither they nor their ancestors responded to?

- Females are more attracted to zebra finches that have a white feather glued to its head - Artificial attributes elicit stronger reactions from females then natural ornaments - Artificial signals may elicit responses because ancestors used similar signals during courtships in past, todays decedents have retained sensory preferences of ancestors - Sometimes traits that females find attractive have no benefit it is just a preexisting sensory bias

Explain sexual selection and the evolution of male traits harmful to females

- Females from a monogamous lineage of fruit flies lost much of their biochemical resistance to damaging chemicals present in seminal fluids of polygymous males - Monogamous females lay fewer eggs when mated with polygynous males then control females

Explain the adjustment of copulation frequency in polyandrous females

- Females living in territory with two males solict copulations more often from male that has spent less time with them regardless of alpha or beta status - Benefit of distributing copulations between two males is that she gets help from two males raising kids - By copulating with extra male and using his sperm to fertilize an egg or two polyandrous female has made it advantageous for other male to invest parentally in her offspring - By mating with several males, female may encourage all sexual partners to leave her offspring alone - Potentially infanticidal males generally do ignore females baby if they have mated with mother prior to birth of infant, why female will copulate with more then one male even when they are not ovulating or when they are pregnant

Explain sensory exploitation in guppies

- Females prefer to mate with males that have bright orange markings - Male guppies cannot synthesize orange pigments, instead acquire carotenoids from plants they eat - When mating preference first appeared it was a byproduct of a sensory preference that had evolved in another context - Female guppies feed avidly on rare but nutritionally valuable orange fruits - Females evolved visual sensitivity to orange stimuli because of foraging benefits not because of fitness benefits from selective mate choice

Explain the good genes hypothesis

- Fertility assurance may have contributed to evolution of polyandry - Polyandry may allow for sperm competition that increases quality of resultant offspring - Females of wild guinea pig seek out copulations with more then one male, reduces stillbirths and losses of offspring before weaning - Females who seek out multiple partners may increase odds of receiving some sperm of exceptional quality and good genes - Sons of extra pair liaisons have boosted reproductive success - Daughters of extra pair liaisons are more fecund and lay more eggs - Mothers invest more into offspring of extra pair relations by making larger then usual eggs to be fertilized which gives greater supply of nutrients and an early developmental boost to extra pair offspring, suggests that production of fitter offspring is due to contributions of mother to her progeny not because females have acquired good genes from one or more males - Older males have greater success in extra pair matings because older males have demonstrated ability to stay alive which may be due to their genotype - If some males have good genes for survival or sexiness offspring of such males might live longer and be more attractive

Explain sibiling aggression in the great egret

- Two great egret chicks fight viciously infront of indifferent parent - Third hatched chick evicted from nest by its older sibilings

Explain communication

- For communication to evolve there must be a positive net benefit - Males of many frogs/toads participate in evolved communication systems from which both male signalers and female receivers benefit - When making alarm call there occasionally is negative effect of getting caught but usually caller is able to get away and call alerts relatives so net benefit is positive - If one bird is begging others must exadurate in order to be heard, larger the brood the louder they are - Free information, one species calls an alarm, this gives information to everyone in area that a predator is near

Explain optimal foraging and northwester crows

- Forage on whelks with thick shells - Crow drops whelks to break shells - Reto Zach studied relationship between height, snail size and number of drops to break shell - Crows only attempt to open large whelks because this gives best net caloric gain, adaptive behavior - For large whelks energy gain was 2 kcal and flight cost was 0.5 kcal for a net gain of 1.5 kcal - Medium whelks needed many more drops, net energy gain was a loss of 0.3 kcal - 5 m is most beneficial drop height - Takes about 5 drops, crows kept trying with same whelk even if it took many drops - Dropping from a higher height does not lower amount of drops required - Chance that whelk will break is about ¼ on any given drop - Crow that abandoned unbroken whelk after series of unsuccessful drops would not have better chance of breaking replacement whelk, finding new prey would take time and energy Checked if birds decisions were optimal by checking if birds behavior was efficient in generating broken whelks with following predictions - Large whelks should be more likely then smaller ones to shatter after 5 m drop - Drops of less then 5m should yield reduced breakage rate - Drops of higher then 5m should not greatly improve chances of opening whelk - Probability that whelk will break should be independent of number of times it has already been dropped

Define imprinting

- Form of prepared learning - A young animals early social interactions usually with its parents lead to learning such things as what constitutes an appropriate sexual partner

Explain tinbergen's four questions

- Four levels of analysis, two proximate and two ultimate - Stem from Niko Tinbergen's four questions 1.Mechanism/Causation: How does the behavior get elicited? What signals are required and what pathways within the animal are involved? 2.Development/Ontogeny: How does the behavior change with age, experience and environement? 3.Evolution/Phylogeny: What is the evolutionary history of this behavior? 4. Function/Adaptation: How does this behavior help the animal survive?

Explain pleiotrophy and adaptations

- Genes have multiple effects on development, some of which may be positive while others negative - If negative consequences of a gene are outweighed by positive ones, less then perfect effects can persist in populations - Costs of rare events may be so small that gene persists in population

why do sperm and eggs differ in size

- Geoffery Parker Results from divergent selection that favors: - Individuals whose gametes were good at fertilizing other gametes because of their small size and mobility - Individuals whose relatively large gametes were good at developing after being fertilized

Can group selection work?

- George C Williams challenged logic of group selection in Adaptation and Natural Selection 1964 - arguments changed the way we think about natural selection by focusing on the level which selection operates - persistence of a hereditary trait and the genes underlying the development of trait were much more likely to be determined by differences in the reproductive success of genetically different individuals then by survival differences among genetically different groups - if group selection favours a trait the involves reproductive self sacrifice while natural selection acts against it natural selection will trump group selection - systems of group based gene accounting and systems based on individuals level kin selection are mathematically equivalent

Explain gull ancestry

- Good reason to believe that ancestral gull was ground nesting species allowing mobbing tactic to evolve - Few cliff nesting species are most likely descendants of more recent cliff nesting species that evolved from original ground nesting ancestor - Alternative that original gull was cliff nester but the cliff nesting trait would have to have been lost and then regained which is unlikely

Explain maternal females in earwigs

- Guard clutch of eggs which she will protect against predators - Costly because they will face long interval before they can breed again

Why seek adoptive parents?

- Gull chicks that abandoned their natal nests in search of foster parents weighted much less than average for chicks of their age - Sometimes adopted by non-relatives - By sneaking into foster parents brood an adopted chick can enhance its chances of survival - Third chick that hatches faces uphill battle with older two siblings - Third chick depends on enough food coming back to the nest to feed first two chicks and itself after the first two - Third chick often runs away from home to attempt to crash nest of another gull with smaller chicks then itself - Third chick has no choice, if they don't leave they will die no matter what - High risk of dying when leaving nest but there is chance that they will crash a brood and survive - Parental rejection may be impaired by possibility of rejecting their own chick by accident

Explain helping behaviour in saturated habitats

- Helping behavior is favored when there are few breeding opportunities for dispersing adults - Helping behavior promoted by saturated habitat shown by Jan Komdeur - Helpers improve the chances that their parents will live to breed again another year - Extra siblings yield an average of 0.30 additional indirect fitness units for each helper - When very few openings are available for dispersing youngsters helping is more likely to be an adaptive option - Vacant territories induce helpers to immediately stop helping and move into open territories, begin breeding personally - Young birds whos parents had prime sites often stayed put securing direct and indirect fitness gains - Young birds on poor natal territories had little chance of helping to boost reproductive success of their parents so instead left home - Helper birds more likely to leave home territory if they lose one or both of their parents due to reduced relatedness and reduced inclusive fitness

Explain how STDs might be an issue in polyandry

- Mating with multiple males raises risk of STDs, true for animals just like humans - Examined by Charles Nunn - In primates number of mates accepted by females is correlated with investment made in white blood cells/immune system - More polyandrous the species the greater the challenge to immune system - More aggressive immune system in polyandrous species - Immune system built to resist STDs in polyandrous species

Explain altruism in vertebrates and insects

- Highly social vertebrates engage in facultative altruism not obligate altruism - Maximize their inclusive fitness via a mix of indirect and direct fitness - Adaptive altruism: helpers are giving up relatively little in direct fitness because their chances of reproducing personally are very low, outweighed by indirect fitness benefits derived from boosting the fitness of close relatives that are full siblings with a relatively high coefficient of relatedness - Monogamy would promote adaptive fitness in vertebrates - More partners taken by female bird lower the relatedness of siblings to one another and less likely benefit of helping relatives will overcome costs to altruist in terms of personal reproduction

Why do males congregate?

- Hotspot hypothesis: males cluster in places/hotspots where receptive females are likely to be found - Hotshot hypothesis: subordinate males cluster around highly attractive males in order to have chance to interact with females attracted to these hotshots - Female preference hypothesis: males cluster because females prefer large groups of males where they can more quickly or safely compare quality of potential mates - Hypothesises not mutually exclusive

Explain the pathway from subordinant/nonterritorial to dominant/territorial male

- Hypothalamus -> egr1 -> GnRH neurons -> pituary -> LH, FSH -> Gonads, testes get bigger - Sensory inputs activate egr gene in the GnRH1 neurons in hypothalamus - Early growth response 1 gene produces transcription factor that activates gene releasing GnRH - GnRH activates the GnRH receptor, gonadotropin releasing hormone 1 neurons project to the pituary - Pituary activates genes for release of gonadotropin hormones - Luteinizing and follicle stimulating hormone increases, these cause GnRH1 neurons to increase in size - Non territorial males have small testes but produce sperm, after transition egr1 gene activity falls - After males switch from nonterritorial to territorial status the GnRH gene becomes increasingly active over time in certain brain cells - Males that switch from territorial to nonterritorial status show reduced activity in GnRH gene - When territorial male is removed a nonterritorial subordinate may replace it - Switch triggered by upregulation of the gene for GnRH which is triggered by upregulation of the egr-1 gene - cascade of behavioural and physiological changes ensues

Explain mutations and adaptations

- If appropriate mutation does not occur selection cannot keep up with environmental change - Maladaptive or nonadaptive traits can persist - Some arctic moths live in regions where bats are absent but moths still cease flying in response to ultrasonic stimulus - Even though these behaviors are not used in nature they still require developmental energy - Man made changes in environment are especially likely to lead to inappropriate expression of previously adaptive traits - Some moths are so strongly attracted to light that bats visit lights in order to make easy kills - Male bupresid beetles may die while persistently attempting to mate with beer bottles

Explain social environment and task specialization by worker honeybees

- If old bees are added to colony it suppresses foraging in younger bees - If young bees are added to colony more young bees forage

Explain an iterated prisoners dilemma

- If the game is played many times a different result is favored - If the other player cooperates the first time, they are most likely to cooperate the second time

Explain helping behaviour in females

- If unpaired dominant older male courts young female she almost always leaves her family to nest with male particularly if the male has a group of helpers resulting in high direct fitness payoffs - If young subordinate males are only potential mates available young female will refuse to set up housekeeping since young males usually come with no helpers and when they try to breed their fathers often harass them trying to force them to abandon their mates and return home to help rear siblings - Females that don't pair off may slip egg into someone else's nest or become a helper if breeding pair are her parents - If one or both of her parents have died she is unlikely to become a helper and will wait conserving energy for a better time to reproduce - Females only become helpers when indirect fitness benefits are substantial

Explain the cost benifit analysis of parental care

- In many birds both parents work to raise kids - Without parentally provided food most nestlings would die - Parents take risks to feed their offspring - Predators survey feeding parents to locate nests - Parental investment: when parents give up their future to take care of current offspring, care is costly Ghalambor and Martain predicted that parent birds should adjust their provisioning behavior adaptively in accord with two key factors: - Whether predators eat nestlings or parents - annual mortality rate of breeding adults

Explain the differences in sizes of the nucleus of the song system in birds

- In species such as white crowned sparrow in which males sing and females do not the RA should be bigger in male brains then females - Since females don't sing the RA is very small in females

Explain kin selection and helpful behaviour

- Indirect selection - Helpful behavior is unlikely to yield direct fitness benefits - Example is ground squirrel giving alarm call

Explain cooperation

- Individual A and individual B help eachother right now, both individuals gain direct fitness - Example hunting in groups, they all get a part of the food - When one wolf helps its fellow wolfs pull down a buffalo the cooperative hunter gets some meat even if it did not apply killing bite - Brown necked ravens that hunt large lizards in teams - Mutual defense in society of bluegills

Explain postponed cooperation

- Individual A eventually gains access to a resource controlled by individual B because of its prior help - Individual B gains direct fitness and individual A gains direct fitness after a delay - Helping in paper wasps is an example

Explain spite

- Individual A reduces its reproductive success to harm individual B - Individual A loses inclusive fitness and individual B loses inclusive fitness - No good examples in nature because both parties receive fitness losses

Explain maladative altruism

- Individual A sacrifices its lifetime inclusive fitness to help individual B - Individual A looses inclusive fitness and individual B gains direct fitness - Example is host parents victimized by brood parasites, they raise unrelated parasite offspring at a cost to themselves - No benefit

Define proximate causes of behaviour

- Mechanistic level of explaination - biochemical reasoning - physiological reasoning of males being monogomous

Explain reciprocity

- Individual B directly pays back individual A for its prior help - Individual B gains direct fitness and individual A gains direct fitness after a delay - Example is primates that groom one another and pied flycatchers that help neighbors in need that have previously helped them - Direct payback not common because population composed of reciprocal helpers would be venerable to invasion by individuals happy to accept help but forget about the payback, these are defectors - Defectors reduce fitness of helpers which makes reciprocity less likely to evolve

Explain deceit and manipulation

- Individual B exploits or manipulates individual A in ways that harm individual A but benefit individual B - Individual A loses inclusive fitness and individual B gains inclusive fitness - Example is avian brood parasitism

explain coevolution and adaptations

- Individuals interact in ways that affect eachothers fitness - If what is adaptive for one individual is maladaptive for another evolutionary stability may never be reached - As members of one group change in response to selection pressure imposed by another group selection may favor counterresponses - Inability of selective processes to generate an immediate effective solution to an altered environmental problem means that some less than perfect traits can remain in a species

Explain insects and social behaviour

- Individuals sacrifice reproductive chances to help others

Define a conditional strategy

- Inherited mechanism that gives the individual the ability to alter its behavior adaptively in light of conditions it confronts

Explain adaptive altrusim

- Initial direct fitness sacrifice made by individual A leads to indirect fitness gains for individual A - Individual A gains indirect fitness and individual B gains direct fitness - Calling an alarm to alert close relatives of a predator is a cost to yourself because the call alerts predator to yourself - Cooperative breeding in florida scrub jays

Explain the development of behaviour

- Interactive process in which genetic information interacts with changing internal and external environments in ways that assemble the organism with special properties and abilities - Not simple nature/nurture dichotomy - Ex. Language acquisition occurs as a gene-environment interactions

Explain sexual conflict

- Interests of males and females may not always coincide during reproduction - Sperm fertilization proteins in Drosophila are toxic to females - Traumatic insemination in bedbugs

Explain the european cuckoo chicks

- Interspecific brood parasitism - European cuckoo chicks begging call matches four baby reed warblers - Chicks of Horsfields bronze cuckoo mimic fairy wrens nesting call - Cuckoos dont make their own nest and never raise their own offspring, always lay eggs in another nest - Eggs of cuckoos look exactly the same as warbler eggs

Explain how beldings ground squirrels indentify kin

- Juvenile squirrels were first given 3 trials during which they could investigate their own odors applied to plastic cubes - Squirrels decline responsiveness to their own dorsal gland scents over initial trials - Then squirrels were provided with plastic cubes daubed with dorsal gland odors from 4 categories of individuals - Cubes with scents from close relatives received less attention than those with scents from distant relatives or nonkin - Olfactory cues are most likely the reasoning behind kin recognition - Less related the more inspection time - Sent is reflection of relatedness

Explain the dance of the honey bees

- Karl von Frisch, 1973 Nobel Prize - worker bees perform elaborate dances when they return to the hive after finding source of pollen/nectar - example of decent with modification - Round Dance: food within 50 m of hive - Waggel Dance: food more then 50 m from hive - direction of dance relative to angle of gravity correlated to direction food is relative to angle of sun - duration of dance correlates to distance from hive - if bee walks directly up hive while waggling the flower will be found by flying directly towards sun - if bee waggles straight down comb flower located directly away from sun - a patch of flowers 20 degrees to the right of the hive relative to sun in advertised with waggles pointing 20 degrees to the right of the vertical on the comb

Explain the dilution effect in butterflies

- Large groups are more conspicuous to predators - Butterflies in large groups experience lower predation then individuals in small groups or those that are solitary - Larger group the less likely that you will be the one eaten - Any costs imposed arising from increaded conspicuousness of groups may be offset by a dilution in the chance that any one individual will be killed by an attacker

Explain honest signals

- Larger and smaller competitors gain from honest signals - Small males don't waste time or energy or risk injury - Large males save time and energy - As mimic became more common, natural selection would favor receivers that ignored easily faked signals reducing value of producing them, lead to spread of honest signals

Explain sperm transfer and the size of nupital gifts

- Larger the nuptial gift the longer the mating and more sperm male can pass to female - Females only copulate with males for as long as food lasts - If less then 5 mins no sperm is transferred

Explain spatial vs non spatial learning in corvids

- Learning abilities reflect the different ecological circumstances - Ex. Clarks nutcrackers are food storing specialists more so than other corvids, they can cache nearly 100,000 seeds in a season up to 25 km away - On tests of spatial learning ability they out perform other corvids but they do not excel on nonspatial learning tasks - Clark nutcrackers are much better at spatial tasks then other corvids but are only average at nonspatial tasks, this means this is not a general intelligence, it is a specialized form of learning - Male pinyon jays make fewer errors than females do when retrieving seeds from caches they or their mates have made, difference due to male pinyon jays provision for females and offspring while females stay with eggs/kids - pinyon jays males have a better spatial memory then females

Why do leks form?

- No single explanation for where and why leks form - Interactions on leks seem to enable some individuals to demonstrate their superior condition to visiting females - Male mating systems are evolved response to female mating systems and to ecological factors that determine spatial distribution of females

Explain bower courtship

- Leching species - Found in Austrialia and New Guinea - 20 species in family, 17 build bowers - Display court made with special ordaminents to attract female - Females initially visit several bower to look first - Female will take break and construct a nest - Female returns to a number of bowers observing full courtship routines of several males - female chooses one male and enters his bower - Female is courted again and crouches down to invite male to copulate - Female flies off after copulation, will have no further contact with male - Female incubates and rears nestlings by herself - Male stays at his bower for 2 month breeding season courting other females and copulating with any that are willing

Explain spatial learning in voles

- Linked to home range size - Linked to mating systems and sex - Polygynous meadow vole males range over a wide area - Perform better than sedentary female meadow voles on navigation through a maze, a test of spatial learning ability - In monogamous prairie voles there is no sex difference, males and female perform equally well - Polygenous species have more sex differences in spatial learning ability

What developmental factors are responsible for song dialets in birds

- Little genetic differntation amoung six different dialect groups of white crowned sparrows - Differences in bird song not genetic - Differences may be due to environemental orign such as differences in social environment - Behavior learned and differences due to early social differences in early development - Hand reared birds not exposed to their populations song failed to develop normal calls but did when taped calls were played - According to hypothesis young white crowns have a special sensitive period 10-50 days after hatching when their neural systems can acquire information from listening to white crown song but not to any other species song - Record in their brains the songs they hear in early life - At about 6 months they start to practice the songs they've recorded

Explain social experience and song development in birds

- Luis Baptista examined role of social experience in song development - Occasionally white crowns learn song of other species - Young white crowns placed in cages where they could see and hear song sparrows or strawberry finches which acted as social tutors - Young white crowns learned the song of their social tutor - white crowned sparrow that has been caged next to a strawberry finch will learn song of its social tutor but will not learn song of a nearby unseen white crowned sparrow - Social acoustical experience can override purely acoustical stimulation during development of white crowned sparrow singing - If individual is played many different tape recorded songs individual will only learn song of their own species but if visual cues are given individual will learn song of other species

Explain net benifit theory

- Maladaptive response of the receiver is caused by a proximate mechanism that results in fitness losses that reduce but do not eliminate the net fitness gain associated to reacting to a signal giver in a particular way - Fish attracted to small fish for food gives net benefit but occasionally this will be a false lure such as an angular fish - Fireflies and predators - Katydids and cicadas - Sexual deception of thynnine wasps by elbow orchids - Sundew plants and insect prey

Explain parental care in male baboons

- Male baboons intervene on behalf of their own offspring when young baboons start fighting

Explain the monogamous honey bee drone

- Male leaves genitalia in female reproductive tract and dies - Ensures female will not mate again

Explain the exceptions to the rule of females providing most paternal care

- Male only parental care is common in fish such as pricklebacks and gunnels - More paternal care in fish due to external fertilization

explain posthumous mate guarding, when is this behaviour favored

- Male red backed spiders and honey bee drones - may gain by breaking off genital appendages in partners reproductive tract if this increases their fertilization success with female Favored if: - Female has potential to remain receptive after one mating - Males probability of finding second female is low

Explain male thynnine wasps and learning

- Male thynnine wasps can learn to avoid being deceived by orchids once they have gained experience with them - If learning mechanisms are costly then we expect learning to evolve only when there is a net benefit - Male thynnine wasps derive benefit by learning to avoid sites where they have encountered sexually deceptive orchids - Frequency of visits to deceptive orchids falls after male wasps have interacted with it and learned that an unrewarding source of sex pheromone is associated with that particular location

Explain sexual deception of the elbow orchid

- Male wasps attracted to odor and appearance of female decoys - Males grasp female decoys and try to carry them off - Male wasps pick up pollen packets of orchid for later transfer to another deceptive orchid - illegitimate signalers can evolve if there is legitimate communication system to exploit - Plant is exploiting preexisting sensory bias in male wasps which first evolved a sensitivity to appearance and odor of females - Orchid later mimicked appearance and odor of females via evolution of female decoys

Explain the importance of social environment in song learning for birds

- Males able to learn local version of their species specific song can communicate better with rivals that will also be singing that particular learned song variant - Predicts that males should be able to fine tune their songs even after settling on initial version relatively early in life - Two different males mostly sang one of two song dialects initially but started singing the song that matched their neighbours song soon after arrival

Explain mating systems in ruffs

- Males display plumage to females that visit groups of performing males - Female eventually selects one male to mate with Three Types of Males: - Territorial - Satellite - Female mimic

Explain lek polygyny

- Males display, females choose - Males do not search for mates or defend groups of females or resources that females covet - Fight to control small area in a display arena/lek - Males territory contain little of value except for male itself - Huge inequalities in male mating success are typical - Different females prefer same male - Ex. White-bearded manakin, topi antelope, hammer-headed bat

Explain postponed cooperation in long tailed manakins

- Males form pairs of unrelated individuals and sing loud duets on display court - If female visitor starts jumping excitedly on perch in response to displays, subordinate member of duo departs and dominant male copulates with female - When female flies off after copulation mated male calls out for its partner to resume its cooperative duties - Alpha male may have several display partners - Only alpha male reproduces - Subordinates compete to be primary dance partner of alpha male - Top ranking subordinate takes over as alpha male upon death or disappearance of alpha male - Beta males work for unrelated partners because this is the only way to join a queue to have any chance of becoming a reproducing alpha male - After the death of alpha male the beta male that has now become an alpha copulates about as frequently as his predecessor because females attracted to duo in past return to display area - There is no guarantee that a beta male will become an alpha only a better then average chance of doing so

Explain conditional mating strategies

- Males make different choices about development or behavior based upon condition - Ex if large males are abundant in population and you are small male it may be pointless to attempt to challenge these males directly, may be better to develop alternative set of mating tactics

Explain forced copulation in birds

- Males of stichbird sometimes assault females on neighboring territories - Force them to ground - Male transfers sperm while she is on her back

Explain the costs of care in mouth brooding cichlids

- Males or females may mouthbrood a clutch - Both sexes loose weight while mouthbrooding - Both sexes must replenish food reserves after brooding but females must wait longer - Parental care cost females more then it costs males - Females that have cared for their eggs are much slower to produce new batch of eggs than females that have not provided care to their clutch - Parental males spawn less often than non parental males - Females need to replenish weight lost by parental care and weight lost from producing clutch of eggs, very costly - May eat kids if they have lost too much weight

Explain mate guarding monogamy in rock haunting possum

- Males tend to live with females in two adult units more often when females live far apart from eachother on small territories, favors mate guarding by males - Mate guarding facilitated by small discrete home ranges occupied by females - Live along edge of rock outcrops in northern Australia - Female live so far away from eachother that leaving female to find another is not reliable - On small territories males can effectively monitor activities of one females without expending great deal of energy - Ecological factors that enable females to live in small defensible territories tilt the cost-benefit equation toward mate guarding which then leads to male monogamy

Explain testosterone and parental care

- Males whose testosterone levels are reduced by antiandrogen provide more food for broods and have highest fledging rates per brood - High levels of testosterone results in low paternal care - Testosterone makes males want to find more females to mate with and less interested in paternal care

Why do birds mob?

- Many birds mob predators when they approach their nests to drive predators away and protect young - Red winged blackbirds attack intruders in nesting colonies - Blackbirds loose 1/3-2/3 of their offspring every season - Hawks will fake attack you if near the nest, will dive down as if to attack but will never actually hit you - If parents assault distract predators from their offspring then mobbing gulls may increase reproductive success - Hypothesis based on notion that costs to mobbers such as time and energy expended were outweighed by the fitness benefits to the birds from their social harassment of predators such as improvement of survival chances of offspring - Predators more likely to be mobbed the closer they get to nesting colony - Eggs inside the colony are less likely to be eaten - Mobbing behavior and nesting in colonies is adaptive

Explain adaptive developmental switch mechansisms and polyphenisms

- Many species where multiple distinct alternative phenotypes coexist called polyphenisms - Developmental switch mechanisms can produce polyphenisms within the same species - Polyphenism: two different developmental pathways produced two different phenotypes - Polyphenisms produced by differences in food, social structures or presence of predators which can produce solider morphs

Explain mate assistance monogamy in seahorse

- Mate assistance hypothesis proposes that males remain with single female because paternal care and protection of offspring are advantageous - Pregnant male gives birth to single partners offspring - Several young emerge from fathers pouch - Male has durable relationship with female who provides him with series of clutches - Males will eat low quality eggs from small females - Monogamous system favored due to fact that male already has female that can continuously provide him with high quality eggs so there is no point searching for additional females

Explain mate choice without material benefits

- Mate choice may be based on physiological challenging task such as in male canaries that sing challenging songs - Females prefer trills that are composed of broad band width syllables sung at very fast rate - Sexual selected ornaments also contribute to mate choice

Explain mate guarding

- Mate guarding gives males sperm advantage in sperm competition - Prevents females from mating with other males - Benefits of mate guarding increase with probability that unguarded female will mate again and use sperm of later partners to fertilize eggs - Cost is time lost while male guards companion and fights off other males - Costs of lost opportunities to mate with other females is less then benefits of monopolizing one female and her eggs

Explain the adaptive significance of bower building

- Mate quality advertisement hypothesis - Bower building may covey useful information about mate quality to female benefiting males with nice bowers - Prediction: male mating success should be correlated with features of bower that vary from male to male - Attractive well decorated bowers are built by males that are superior and healthier, unlikely to infect mates with parasites or pathogens and more likely to posses sperm with genes for disease resistance

Explain paths to monogamy

- Mate-guarding monogamy: male guards female during her fertile period to ensure that no other males mate with her - Mate-assistance monogamy: male helps raise kids - Female enforced monogamy: female forces male to help raise kids

Explain conditional strategies and migration

- Migratory and non migratory individuals occur in some species - Lifetime fitness of the two types should be the same - Differences between migratory and non migratory individuals are caused by differences in genes - If a bird can change from migrant strategy to resident strategy then the differences in the two behavioral pattern is not hereditary - Socially dominant individuals should be able to choose the better of the two options under the control of a conditional strategy forcing subordinates to make the best of a bad situation by adopting the option with lower reproductive payoff - Subordinate strategies will confer higher fitness then they could get from attempting to behave like dominants - When choosing freely between tactics individuals should choose the option with higher reproductive payoff

Explain ground squirrels and mobbing

- Mob snakes - Example of convergent evolution under a similar selection pressure - Approach and tail flag rattlesnakes - Know the difference between venomous and non-venomous snakes - Resistant to rattlesnake venom - Tail flagging differs according to snake type, heat up tails for venomous rattlesnakes, not for non venomous snakes - Rattlesnake will attack the tail, the least essential part of the body

Explain the warrior gene

- Monoamine oxidase A is enzyme that breaks down neurotransmitters such as dopamine, serotonin and norepinephrine - Several alleles for the gene, some work well, others don't and are less effective - Less effective alleles are related to higher levels of violence - One allele of the gene is associated with predilection toward violent behavior - Strong evidence for a gene-environment interaction with aggressive variant children subjected to violence and abuse are more likely to become violent and abusive adults than individuals with other alleles of the gene - If missing monoamine oxidase A enzyme dopamine, serotonin and norepinephrine will remain at high levels - Dopamine, serotonin and norepinephrine effect the fight or flight response - Those without monoamine oxidase A enzyme will be constantly violent - Those with less effective alleles can give a reasoning behind those committing violent crimes, their genes made them do it - Effect of gene is dependent on early environment - Early environmental influence can eliminate harmful genetic effects

Explain red shouldered widowbird and territoriality

- More dominant individuals have brighter red wing epaulettes - Males display red wing to distinguish who is more dominant, aggressive signal - Territory owners almost always win even when they have been removed from their territory and when red epaulettes have been covered to eliminate a signal of dominance, shows territory owners are stronger and more fit - Males with smaller duller shoulder patches are floaters that hang around other males territories and concede defeat whenever challenged - Floaters are ready to assume control of vacant territories if a territory owner disappears

Explain the dilution effect in mayflies

- More female mayflies that emerged together on a given day the less likely any individual mayfly was to be eaten by a predator - Advantage that females will live long enough to lay eggs - Ability to use other to hide behind

Explain some material/direct benefits of polyandry for females

- More resources hypothesis: more mates means more resources received from sexual partners of female - More care hypothesis: more mates means more caregivers to help rear females offspring - Better protection hypothesis: more mates means more protectors to keep other males from sexually harasssing polyandrous female - Infanticide reduction hypothesis: more mates means greater uncertainty about paternity of an infant when it is born and thus fewer males with no stake in the welfare of the polyandrous females offspring

Explain sexual difference theory

- Most females mate with one male - Male is often same individual that other females like - Leads to unequal reproductive success among males - Very few females have more then two mates per breeding season and few use sperm of more than one male to fertilize their eggs - Same male may mate with more then 20 females in single season while others don't mate at all - Pattern of males building courtship displays and females evaluating male performance is common and related to fundamental difference between sexes

Explain matriphagy in Caecilians

- Mother caecilians live with their offspring and permit them to remove and feed upon her nutritious skin - Nestling caecilians have curved teeth for purpose of stripping edible skin from their mothers

Explain the nature/nurture misconception

- Nature vs nurture dichotomy strongly embedded in popular view of animal behavior - Ex. Instinct is genetic, learning is environments - Misconception, misses importance of gene environment interactions - Both genetic and environmental differences among individuals lead to differences in development

Explain mobbing in black turns

- Nest in loose colonies - Parents of the nest at which the predator is closest will hit the predator, this is high risk

Explain the song system/brain of a typical songbird

- Neural pathways carry signals from the HVC to the nXIIts to the muscles of the song producing syrinx - Other pathways connect the nuclei such as the IMAN and area X that are involved in song learning rather than song production HVC - higher vocal center RA - robust nucleus of the arcopallium IMAN - lateral portion of the magnocellular nucleus of the anterior nidopallium - key to song learning, large in song learners - reduced or absent in non song learners NCM - the caudomedial neostriatum X : area x nXIIts - tracheosyringeal portion of the hypoglossal nucleus - sends messages to syrinx that produces songs - If you disrupt the HVC to RA to nXIIts pathway you impair the ability to produce song

Explain the evolution of cognitive skills

- New Caledonian crow is unusual in its ability to modify objects in its environment in ways that improve their usefulness such as tools for the extraction of beetle larvae out of reach - Two spotted hyenas have spontaneously figured out that they both have to pull ropes at same time in order to secure food that is out of reach - Dogs have evolved the ability to pay attention to humans - Dogs do better than wolves reared in same way when it come to using human provided cues such as gazing at a food bowl or pointing at it to go to the correct bowl with food - Differences in cognitive abilities between domesticated dogs and their immediate ancestors wolfs - Cognitive skills may have evolved recently in the domestication of animals

Explain instinct theory

- Niko Tingbergen and Konrad Lorenz - Proposed that simple stimuli such as red dot on parent gulls bill can activate or release complex behaviours such as gull chicks begging behavior

Explain the by product hypothesis

- Non-adaptive - Habitat saturation may lead to delayed dispersal of offspring - Stay at home offspring might be exposed to begging behavior of nestlings which triggers parental behavior in young non-breeding adults - Birds are hardwired to feed kids that are begging for it, doesn't matter whose kid it is - Assumes selection could not eliminate helpers tendency to feed its parents offspring without also destroying the capacity of helper to care for its own nestlings at a later date - Predicts that underlying mechanism of parental care should not differ between helping and non-helping species

Explain optimality theory and antipredator behaviour

- Notion that adaptations have greater benefit to cost ratios then alternative that have been replaced by natural selection - Tool used to perform cost-benefit analysis - Selection favors phenotype X because this is the phenotype that has the best cost-benefit result, X is the only adaptation because it produces the greatest net benefit - X will spread throughout the population, other phenotypes will decline

Explain single cells and song learning in the swamp sparrow

- One mechanism that could help young male control his song type output would be a set of specialized neurons in the HVC that respond selectively to song type - Activity in these cells could contribute to his ability to monitor what he is singing so that he could adjust his repertoire strategically

Explain the formation of taste aversions

- Operant conditioning: an animal learns to associate voluntary action with consequences that follow - Skinnerian psychologists once argued that one could condition almost any operant - Animal behaviourists have found this is not true, learning has limits governed by ecological circumstances - Operant conditioning reinforces a response to a stimulus via association with pleasure or displeasure - Although white rats can easily learn that certain taste cues will be followed by sensations of nausea and that certain sounds will be followed by skin pain caused by shock they have great difficulty forming learned associations between taste and consequent skin pain or between sound and subsequent nausea

Explain genetic control of behaviour

- Operation of single gene may be necessary but not sufficient for normal expression of behavior - Operation of many genes may be necessary for normal expression of a behavior - If one of the genes is disrupted the behavior may be altered

Explain parental care

- Orange plumes in baby rails may affect way parents treat individual offspring, indicates quality of child - Parental care leads to evolution of certain traits - Offspring can tell parents if they are high quality

Explain essential history by Charles Darwin

- Origin of Species - theory of evolution by natural selection - laid out basic conceptual framework for natural selection

Explain how parents may control sibilicide

- Parent boobies can control siblicide to some extent - Rate of early siblicide by masked booby chicks declines when they are placed in nests with intervention prone blue footed booby foster parents - Rate of early siblicide by blue footed booby chicks rises when they are given laissez faire masked boobies as foster parents

Why adopt genetic strangers

- Parents should recognize their own young and discriminate against strangers when probability of being exploited by someone elses offspring is high as in colonial nesting swallows - Ground nesting gulls occasionally adopt unrelated chicks - Adoption occurs when parental care is cheap - Female goldeneyes often lay eggs in another females nest - Once eggs are hatched theres no cost to mother, only cost when incubating because some of your own eggs might not hatch

Explain how the reproductive value of offspring may be evaluated by parents

- Parents that have limited food resources may use behavior or appearance of progeny to decide how to allocate parental investment - Red mouth gape of lark buntling nestlings is exposed when they beg, brightness may reveal information about immune system - Color of mouth gape affects amount of food that nestling barn swallows are given by parents - colored gapes of some nestlings with two drops of red food coloring received more food - Nestlings with two drops of yellow food coloring were not fed more - Baby coots have unusually colorful feathers near head - Experimental investigators trimmed back orange feather to black feathers underneath - Control groups composed entirely of either unaltered orange chicks or chicks that had orange tips trimmed from their ornamental feathers black were fed at same mean rate - Relative growth of both control groups were same - brood which had chicks that were half orange and half black, orange chicks where fed more - Ornamented orange chicks grew faster than unornamented black chicks in mixed broods - orange coot chicks received preferential treatment over black chicks - Offspring color did not affect total quantity of parental care - All black broods were treated as well as all orange broods

Why are any males paternal

- Paternal care doesn't neccessaraly take away from male mating opportunities - Males can sometimes care for more than one clutch of eggs at a time - some cases parental care can be more expensive for females than males making paternal care more likely - Tradeoff between having more offspring or caring for kids and having higher quality offspring

Explain polyandry and material benifits

- Polyandry may allow females to secure more material benefits associated with mating - Elizabeth May - Female red winded blackbirds gain access to territories of neighboring males to feed if they copulate with them - 1/3-1/4 of offspring not sired by social partner, rather neighbor male - female hangingflies and other insects have incentive to mate several times due to the nutritious spermatophores they receive from their partners - polyandrous butterflies males bribe females with spermatophore that can be used to make more eggs - if females are receiving valuable material benefits for mating then females who mate more should exhibit higher reproductive success - Christopher Wiklund use comparative method to examine predation

Explain developmental flexibility in cichlids

- Polyphenisms may be related to social structure especially in dominance hierarchies - If dominant male is removed, subordinant male will make switch to dominant male - Ciclid Astatotilapia burtoni exist in competitively superior territorial and competitively inferior nonterritorial forms - Males compete for mate attracting territory - Territorial males signal with bright colors - Non territorial males have dull colors - Removal of territorial males triggers a transition from non territorial to territorial phenotype

Explain a selfish herd

- Social mutant that employs hiding behind others - Incur some costs such as two animals being more conspicuous to predators then one and attract more attacks then scattered individuals - If costs are constantly outweighed by survival benefit gained, mutation could spread though population - Eventually all members would be aggregated with individuals jockeying for safest position within groups - Competition amoung group memebers for the safest positions within herd - Individuals try to get a spot in center of herd, which end up being occupied by the dominant individuals - Members would actually be safer if they all spread out and not try to take advantage of one another - But populations of solidary individuals would be vulnerable to invasion by an exploitative social mutant - force social behavior to spread though species

Why may birds accept a parasite egg?

- Some birds can recognize parasite eggs and bury it or remove it from nest - If host parents remove or bury parasite egg the brood parasite might make this behavior unprofitable by returning to the nest to destroy or eat hosts eggs/young, behavior demonstrated in cowbirds - some cases there may be no evolved mechanisms for recognition of foreign eggs - May be recognition errors such as tossing out of your own eggs - Risk of recognition errors is high when rate of parasitism is low - Some birds may abandon their nest after parasitism and begin anew but such behavior may be constrained by availability of other nest sites - probability that female warbler will nest again in her territory is function of number of potential nest sites in her territory - When only a few good nest sites are present a female rarely makes a second nesting attempt - If many sites are available, female usually does renest - Possible that coevolution between host and parasite has driven evolution of brood parasites - If mimicry is good host might not be able to detect a brood parasite egg or nestling

Explain lizards and blue abdominal patches

- Some lizards have large blue abdominal patches - Blue patches used as male threat posture - For species in which the patch has been lost the behavior response has not been lost

Explain polyandry and social insects

- Some members of bees are highly polyandrous - Females accept and use sperm from 10-63 males depending on species - Most bee queens mate only once providing her with all sperm she will need in her lifetime - Can store sperm from single partner, ancestrial condition - Polyandry might increase disease resistance due to increased genetic diversity - Polyandry might increase worker genetic diversity and allow workers to carry out diversity of worker tasks better - Ergonomic Hypothesis: Genetically diverse colonies produce more comb on average then workers in genetically uniform colonies - By mating with several males, female can gain access to pollen and nectar in those males territories - Some female bees must copulate with male each time they enter his territory to collect pollen and nectar

Explain primary helpers at the nest

- Some year old males do not find mates and become primary helpers to mothers helping to raise siblings - related to children they are helping - raise their fitness indirectly though increased production of nondescendant kin - reproduce less over a lifetime but are compensated genetically for helpful behavior via gain of indirect fitness - hard work - Survival of primary helpers is lower then that of secondary helpers or delayers - reduced survival but extra inclusive fitness compensates for loss of direct fitness in the second year

Explain reciprocity in pied flycatchers

- Songbirds that will mob a predator near nests - Pairs choose to help neighbors that had been able to assist them an hour earlier - Remember who has helped them and who has not, use information to pay back those that have been helpful while ignoring those that have not been cooperative

Explain cannibalism polyphenisms

- Specialized morph to become a cannibal - Toad tadpoles are normally herbivores but when food becomes limiting a developmental switch triggers switch to cannibal morph - Common in drying ponds - Individuals develop more rapidly when they are cannibals which allows them to get out of pond quicker and avoid dying as pond dries up - Cost of cannibalism is that adults are smaller

Explain mate quality advertisement hypothesis

- Stephanie Doucet and Bob Montgomerie proposed that good bower builders are healthier birds with fewer parasites - Bower quality reflects developmental history of male - Birds that had plenty of food as they matured should have well constructed brains and be able to excel at demanding manipulative tasks needed to assemble a bower - Joah Madden predicted that brain size of bower builders should be larger then non-bower builders, this was true

Explain ideal free distribution

- Steven Fretwell - Animals are free to move to any habitat - Predict what animals should do when choosing between alternative habitats of different quality in the face of competition for space and food - Expect them to distribute themselves to that they maximize their potential fitness - At equilibrium fitness should be the same in different habitats - If one habitat is superior to another expect animals to move there increasing competition - Animals will continue to move until competition makes it unprofitable - Distribution of animals reflects the distribution of resources - Organisms must make habitat selection decisions based on nature of vegetation and food but also on intensity of intraspecific competition in the area - Requires that individuals move about in order to evaluate quality of different habitats - individuals will settle on sites where reproductive success is maximized

Explain the effect of hatching asynchrony on parental efficiency in cattle egrets

- Studied by Douglas Mock and Bonnie Ploger - Computed index of parental efficiency: number of surviving chicks divided by volume of food brought to nest per day x 100 - Nestlings in artificially synchronous broods fought more, survived less and required more food - Nest with exaggerated hatching asynchrony survived better but required more food - Nest with normal level of hatching asynchrony and brood reduction were most efficient - Parents benifited by allowing the offspring to decide extent of siblicidal brood reduction

Explain cross fostering and imprinting effects

- Tore slagsvold cross fostered blue and great tits in nests - As adults this disrupted normal pair formation within own species - Great tits fostered by blue tits chose blue tits as mates - Some blue tits fostered by great tits choose great tits as mates - Nestlings imprinted on foster parent species - Cross fostered great tits only chose blue tits for mates - Female blue tits with great tits as social mates only produced blue tit nestlings, this means that although these birds had a great tit as a social partner they must have also mated with blue tits on the side since they produced blue tit children - Developmental effect of being reared by members of another species was far greater for great tits than for blue tits

Explain cooperation in lazuli buntings

- Subordinate males have dull plumage and engage in a mutualism with brightly colored dominant males - Bright males drive away intermediate colored males but allow dull colored subordinate males to settle near them in superior habitat - Old males allow young males to settle near their habitat so that these young males will attract mates - Bright colored males get to mate with social partners of dull colored males - Dull colored males regularly care for 1-2 extra young which are genetic offspring of more attractive brightly colored males - Subordinate dull colored males do get to father some offspring as a result of possessing high quality territories that appeal to females - Intermediate males don't father any offspring because they are pushed into poor territories - Because both dull colored and brightly colored males gain some fitness from their interactions allowing this social arrangement to be categorized as cooperation

Explain surface distribution theory and ideal free distribution theory

- Surface distribution model based on assumption that individuals will move about to achieve equal densities over total surfaces provided - Ideal free distribution model based on assumption that individuals were free to move about so as to achieve a constant intake of prey, individuals concentrate themselves in relation to prey densities - Ideal free distribution model is what is seen in nature

Explain how costs of migration are reduced in birds

- Take advantage of weather fronts - Black brant ride cyclonic storms from Gulf of Alaska to California - Snow Geese wait for north storm winds to help propel themselves south nearly for free, surf on winds - flying in V formation

Explain hereditary mating tactics in bluegill sunfish

- Territorials: male guards nest that may attract females - Satellites on territories: little sneaker males wait for an opportunity to slip between spawning pair releasing sperm when territory holder does - Female mimics: larger satellite male with female coloration hovers above nest before slipping between territorial male and his mate when female spawn

Explain territorial battles

- Territory owners gain substantial reproductive benefits - Territory owners almost always win territorial battles - Intruders usually give up territorial battles quickly - Arbitrary rule of territory owner always wins could be an evolutionary stable strategy - Mutants with different behavioral strategy would not spread by natural selection - Intruders that immediately gave up could never be damaged by a tougher resident and therefore resident always wins strategy could persist indefinitely

Explain the comparative method

- Test predictions about which other species should have evolved the trait under investigation - If mobbing by ground nesting gulls is evolved response to predation on gull eggs and chicks then other gull species whos eggs and young are at low risk of predation should not exhibit mobbing behavior - Various costs to mobbing such as increased risk of being killed by a predator will be outweighed only if there are sufficient benefits from distracting predators - If predators do not pose a problem then cost of mobbing such as energy spent would be greater then benefits - Cliff nesting gulls have few predators because it is hard for small predators to scale cliffs or maneuver near cliffs in costal winds - Change in nesting environment led to loss of mobbing behavior which indicates a case of divergent evolution - Supports hypothesis that mass mobbing evolved in response to predation pressure on eggs and chicks, if this pressure is taken away gull loses mobbing behavior - Species from different evolutionary lineages that live in similar environments should experience similar selection pressures and can be predicted to evolve similar traits resulting in convergent evolution - Species will adopt the same adaptive solution to a particular environmental obstacle to reproductive success despite the fact that different ancestral species has different gene - Test hypotheses about the adaptive value of a behavior by predicting particular cases of divergent or convergent evolution

Explain the mafia hypothesis for brood parasitism

- Tested with parasitic cowbirds and prothonotary warblers - Treatment 1: A cowbird laid an egg in the nest which was then removed by experimenter - Treatment 2: All nests were parasitized but the cowbird egg was left in the nest - Treatment 3: The cowbird egg was removed but cowbirds were prevented from returning to the nest

Explain the katydid and sex roles

- Theory of sex role differences predicts that if operational sex ratio were to change over course of breeding season sexual tactics of males and females should change as well - Female katydids only compete with eachother for males when food is scarce - When food is abundant spermatophore is less valuable to females

Explain territoriality and resource holding power

- Those with superior competitive ability should be found in highest quality habitat - American redstarts compete for territories in tropical wintering grounds - Males tend to occupy black mangrove forests and females occupy second growth scrub inland - Older heavier males in mangrove habitat attack intruding females and younger males forcing them into second rate habitats - If older dominant males derive a net benefit from investment in territorial aggression then there should be some survival and reproductive advantages - Redstarts occupying higher quality mangrove territories can leave earlier for breeding grounds because they are able to secure better food and build up fat reserves for migration earlier - If on mangrove forest in wintering grounds, individual is able to produce more kids during breeding season because individual arrives on breeding grounds sooner and secures best breeding territory - Individuals living in mangrove in winter are higher quality individuals and therefore produce more kids

Explain honest signals in toads

- Toads compete for receptive females - Males croak to attract females - When a male finds another male mounted on a female he tries to pull him from her back - Mounted males croak when touched - Often other male concedes defeat and leaves - Large males have deep croak - Small males have high pitch croak - Small males cannot falsify deep croak due to body mass - Deep croak deters small males from pushing off a large male since the small male would not be able to win this fight

Explain the effects of monarch butterfly toxins on blue jays

- Toxins induce vomiting in birds that eat them - Causes aversion to monarchs - Blue jay will be unlikely to ever eat monarch again making this adaptive because of kin selection - Relatives in the area are more likely to survive and avoid predation increasing eaten individuals indirect fitness - Toxicity evolved via indirect selection - Direct selection hypothesis states that monarchs recycle poisons from food plants to make themselves so bad tasting that birds will release them immediately after grabbing a wing, thereby not killing the butterfly

Explain the prisoner's dilemma and game theory

- Two robbers, Larry and Curly, are suspects in an armed robbery - There is insufficient evidence to convict them on most serious charge but there evidence to convict them of minor infraction - If they both stay quiet they will both receive a short sentence - Suckers payoff: player B defects and gets no punishment but player A cooperates and gets 10 years in jail - Temptation: player B cooperates and gets 10 years in jail, player A defects and gets no punishment - Both parties defect/nash equilibrium is the best solution for both, each will get 5 years in jail and this is the evolutionary stable strategy - Everyone would benefit from cooperation but it cannot be guarded against cheaters so it is therefore not evolutionary stable - Mutual defection/Nash Equilibrium: situation where no player has anything to gain by changing their own strategy - Mutual cooperation/Pareto optimal: condition where you cannot increase the reward to one player without decreasing the reward to another

Explain the effectiveness of different visual stimuli in triggering begging behaviour in gulls

- Unrealistically long bills with contrasting bars at the end are extremely effective in triggering begging behavior, indicates that pecking response is induced by red color - Bills with no red dot are extremely uneffective at triggering begging behavior

Explain sexual selection and mate choice

- Usually females choose males based upon male attributes - dung beetle female mates with male after he has made dung ball and has rolled it to distant burrow where he turns present over to female - Male hangingfly captures food which is material benefit to offer his copulatory partner, advertises availability of his gift by releasing pheromone - female fireflies evaluate mates based on duration of light flashes which correlates with size of spermatophore male will give to partner

What is an explanation for altruism

- V.C. Wynne Edwards, Animals Dispersion in Relation to Social Behaviour in 1962 - altruistic behaviour served the good of the group - groups of self sacrificing individuals are more likely to survive known as group selection - used group selection to explain why colonial seabirds raised only single offspring at a time when experiments have shown they could rear two chicks, with on chick seabirds did not overtax food supplies

Explain the fundamental requirements for natural selection

- Variation: members of a species differ in phenotype, morphology or behaviour - Differential reproductive success: some variations result in more surviving offspring then others - Heredity: at least some of this variation is heritable

Explain honest signals in deer

- Visual signal of size and strength - Antler size provides information about fighting ability

Explain honest signals in collared lizard

- Visual signal of size and strength - Larger patch of ultraviolet reflecting skin by the opening of the mouth the harder the lizard can bite

Explain honest signals in paper wasps

- Visual signals of dominance - Dominance linked to dark patches on face - Test eachother occasionally to detect cheaters whose facial signals are not in synchrony with their real fighting ability, these cheaters will be attacked more often - This creates selection for the evolution of accurate signaling

Explain honest signals in antlered fly

- Visual signals of size and strength - Confront eachother head to head permitting each fly to assess his own size relative to the others size - Use antlers to determine size

Explain proximate and ultimate causes of monogamy in prairie voles

- Voles are mouse like animals that live in burrows in grasslands - Males form long term relationships with females pairing off as couple that live together with both parents caring for offspring - Phylogeny suggests that a tendency toward monogamy may have originated early in history of genus Microtus in a now extinct ancestor and has been retained in the monogamous extant species including prairie and pine voles - Monogamy evolved once fairy early in prairie vole lineage and then was lost for two most recent lines of species

Explain grey whale migration

- Vulnerable to killer whales - move to shallow water to breed where they are safe from killer whales - Move back to sea in summer where food is rich

Explain tephritid fly and conspicuous behaviour

- Waves banded wings as if trying to catch attention of predators - Wing markings of fly resemble legs of jumping spiders - Create visual effect similar to aggressive leg waving display of spiders - May be effective escape behavior - Combination of leg like color pattern and wing movement enables tephritid fly to deceive predators into treating it as a dangerous opponent

How can deception evolve

- When action is clearly disadvantageous to individuals there are two possibilities: - Novel environment theory - Net benefit theory

Explain female distribution theory of mating systems

- When food supplements reduce size of female dunnock's home range, male can monopolize access to that female and reduce number of males with which she interacts - Support theory that males attempt to monopolize females within constraints imposed upon them by spatial distribution of mates

Explain reproductive anatomy of female birds

- When mature ovum produced in ovary is released it travels down oviduct where it may encounter sperm and be fertilized - Viable sperm received from males can be stored for long periods in wall of uterus - Sperm move out of tubules and migrate up to oviduct to meet newly released eggs - After fertilization a hard shell is added in the uterus

Explain female defence polygyny

- When receptive females occur in defensible clusters males will compete directly for those clusters, female defense polygyny will result - Ex. Bighorn sheep, gorillas, lions, montzuma oropendulas, spear-nosed bats - In spear-nosed bat a successful male may sire as many as 50 offspring with harem of females, large males guard roosting cluster of smaller females - Males of Montezuma oropendula attempt to monopolize females in small colonies but as colony size increases mating attempts are disrupted by rivals

Explain single genetic difference and maternal behaviour

- Wild type female mice gather their pups together and crouch over them - Females with inactivated fosB genes dont exhibit this behavior - Gene necessary for normal maternal behavior - Mothers will behave badly/ignore kids when fosB gene is removed - fosB is part of reward seeking system of the brain - does not mean that single gene determine maternal behavior but it does mean that loss of function of single gene can impair maternal behavior - example of a gene that is necessary but not sufficient for operation of behavior

Explain subordinate males of Astatotilapia burtoni and the absence of a dominant rival

- Within minutes of removal of dominant male subordinate male may begin to behave more aggressively than before - Change in behavior is correlated with surge in activity of a specific gene in the preoptic region of fish brain - Gene may initiate sequence of other genetic changes that provide the physiological foundation for dominance behaviors - Activity of egr-1 gene ramps up its activity during transition from subordinate to dominant status but then falls back once the male has become dominant

Do females pay attention to male songs in birds

- Yes - Female song sparrows were more receptive to males with better ability to copy a song tutor - Female song sparrows preferred males who could make good copies of the tape tutor song - Accurately copied songs elicted significantly more precopulatory displays from females than songs that were copied less perfectly

Explain instinct

- a behavior pattern that appears in fully functional form the first time it is performed even though the animal may have had no experience with the particular cues that elict the behavior - Baby gulls pecking at parents bill is instinctive - Neural network responsible for detecting simple cue (sign stimulus or releaser) and activating the instinct or fixed action pattern was given label innate releasing mechanism

Explain inclusive fitness

- a total measure on an individuals contribution on genes to the next generation by direct and/or indirect selection - offspring you produce and the contributions youve made towards close relatives fitness - can help or harm close realtives

Explain song type matching in the song sparrow

- ability of males to produce songs or song elements of rival neighbors - Ability to match song types has high influence on fitness - Bird has a repertoire of several different distincitive song types rather than a single vocalization of a particular dialect - Young song sparrows usually learn songs from tutors that are their neighbors in their first breeding season - Shared songs are considered more aggressive than unshared songs - Males can hold territories for up to 8 years - Males who learned more song types held territories longer - Going from 5 to 20 songs increases territory tenure 4 fold - Males that sing more songs have higher fitness - Michael Beecher and Elizabeth Campbell waited by a song sparrows territory until male sang a song shared by his neighbor, then played a taped reply - Best males are those who can signal exactly what his aggressive intentions are toward a particular individual

Explain sensory exploitation

- animals may produce novel signals that tap into preexisting perceptual mechanisms in a signal receiver - major factor in origin of effective signals

Explain adaptation

- arise though natural selection - features of phenotype associated with greater reproductive success and are in part heritable will increase in population over time - framework derived from theory of natural selection - figuring out how a putative adaptation contributes to reproductive success of individuals in goal of behaviour ecologists

Explain the heredity requirement for natural selection

- at least some variation is heritable - if there is heredity variation within a species and if some hereditary variants reproduce more successfully then others then the increased abundance of living decedents of the more successful types will gradually change the species

Explain sexually selected infanticide

- benefits the infanticidal male because female becomes sexually receptive sooner - male lions, langurs and mice are not genetic parents of offspring they kill - males benefit from infanticide and females pay fitness cost - sexual conflict - female lions, langurs and mice use tactics to avoid infanticide but are not always successful - infanticide very rare in humans but 40-60% more likely in step parents

Explain extra pair copulations

- birds social monogamy does not equal genetic monogamy - 90% of female birds engage in extra pair copulations - 1/3 - ¼ eggs of female are not fertilized by females social partner, fertilized by someone else, usually neighboring male - copulating with neighboring male gives female access to resources on his territory - polygynous male of this sort may be able to fertilize eggs of his social parter while also inseminating other females whose offspring will receive care but not from him avoiding costs of monogamy - truly monogamous males are more likely to be cuckolded by their mates and suffer disadvantages of monogomy

Explain female enforced monogamy

- burying beetles - Aggressive towards members of their own sex - Matched pair work together to bury dead mouse or shrew which will feed larvae when they hatch - Mother will eat last baby begging for food - Less eggs on carcass = larger healthier babies - Once carcass is buried male may release pheromone to attract more females - When first female smells pheromone she pushes male off perch - When paired female experimentally tethered so she cannot interact with partner the amount of time he spends releasing sex pheromones rises - Male burying beetles not monogamous by choice

Explain the history of interspecific brood parasitism in cuckoos and cowbirds

- cuckoos parasitism appears to have arisen three separate times - parasite habit probably arose out of intraspecific brood parasitism then shifted to closely related species - Data suggest that number of host species has increased in more recent cowbird species

Explain microsatellite analysis and behavioural ecology

- discovery that social monogamy is not synonymous with genetic monogamy in birds came about primarily through use of DNA fingerprinting analysis - DNA fingerprinting has been replaced with microsatellite analysis because mutations in non coding regions of microsatellite regions of DNA tend to stay in populations because they are selectively neutral - Individuals differ greatly in microsatellites they carry - Offspring have same alleles as parent, if they don't then female mated with male that was not her social partner - Females often socially monogamous but not necessarily genetically monogamous

Explain the evolution and mechanisms of behaviour

- evolution by natural selection shapes mechanisms of behavior as shown by prairie vole mating behavior - evolutionary process determines which genes survive over time - genes that animals possess influence the proximate development of neural mechanisms that make behavior possible - behavior affects genetic success of individuals in the current generation - evolutionary change is ongoing

Define ultimate causes of behaviour

- explains reasoning behind a trait - why the trait occurs - evolutionary history of the trait - mating success of monogamous individuals

Explain how directional and distance communication by honey bees was tested

- fan test to determine whether forages can convey directional info - scout bees trained to come to feeding station at point F - collected all newcomers that arrive at different feeding stations with equally attractive sugar water - most bees showed up at feeder F due to original bees going back to hive and conveying information that food is at feeder F - after training scouts to feed at station 750m from colony all newcomers arriving at feeding stations at various distances from hive were collected - most newcomers arrived at station 750m from hive since waggle dance conveyed distance info

What are some genetic/indirect benefits of polyandry for females

- fertility insurance hypothesis: mating with several males reduces risk that some of females ova will remain unfertililized because some of her partners were infertile - Good genes hypothesis: female mates with more then one male because her social partner is of lower genetic quality than her extra pair partner whose genes will improve offspring viability or sexual attractiveness - Genetic compatibility hypothesis: mating with several males increases genetic variety of sperm available to female which boosts chance that female will receive some sperm whose DNA is unusually compatible with hers

Explain bee mating hypothesis (Digger Bees)

- given a males enthusasm for virgins a female either mates once in her life or uses sperm of first partner to fertilize her eggs - in bee species in which females remain sexually active after mating and no not give male #1 a fertilization advantage males will be less likely to search for virgins - males in species who want virgins should not let other males gains access to receptive females if they can prevent it - all predictions assume males are in race to inseminate as many females as possible while other males are trying to do the same thing - fact that nesting and flower visiting females are rarely pursued by males shows that this species only mates once - males often aggressively defensive of digging sites and sometimes lose to larger males

Explain secondary helpers at the nest

- help unrelated pairs raise offspring - help individuals that are not related to them - raise their fitness directly by increasing their future chances of reproducing personally - temporarily reproduce less but sometimes inherit territories and sexual partners as a result of helpful behavior thereby securing a direct fitness benefit - Probability of finding a mate is higher for secondary helpers because often the original male from the first year disappears, and the secondary helper male will mate with original female from first year, this will not occur for primary helpers

Explain altruism

- helpful behaviour that lowers the helpers reproductive success while increasing the reproductive success of the individual helped - beneficial act to another at the risk of yourself - many ant do not reproduce but help close relatives reproduce - females take care of children of queen, their sisters - colonies composed of sterile individuals that build colonies home, forage for resources and food, care for hatchlings, benefits colony as a whole - workers are female with undeveloped ovaries

How can altrusim be favoured by natural selection

- in order for an altruistic trait to be adaptive the inclusive fitness of altrusistic individuals has to be greater then it would have been if those individuals had tried to reproduce on their own - rare allele for altruism will become more common only if the indirect fitness gained by the altriust is greater then the direct fitness it loses as a result of its self sacrificing behaviour

Explain male langur infanticide

- incoming males kill previous males offspring - females will band together to defend offspring - females are not reproductively active if infants are present - if male kill infants then female will be brought back into ovulation - infanticide does not benefit female in any way but greatly benefits male -for male it is a race against time since eventually a younger male will come and take over

Explain groups of langurs

- indian subcontient - groups of several females, offspring and one or more adult males Three types of groups - single male and single female - multiple males with multiple females - group on only males

Explain optimal foraging in zebra finches

- individuals with highest daily net caloric gains survive best, reproduce most and begin reproducing sooner then others - females can assess feeding rate of male foragers and use this information to choose potential mates - male foraging efficiency leads to reproductive opportunities

Explain lion infanticide

- infanticide linked to arrival of new male into band of females and ejection of previous father - adaptive behaviour due to natural selection - females resist infanticidal attacks, fitness loss to females - gestation period is 110 days - cubs weaned 6-7 months - interbirth period 2 years - males usually only have one chance in lifetime to reproduce, average tenure of a male with a pride is 24 months - if males commit infanticide they cause female to resume ovulation - if female is already pregnant when takeover occurs the female will produce a false heat and copulate with new males to keep them happy and protect unborn cubs, once babies are born the males will believe these offspring are their own

Explain eusociality

- living in cooperative group in which usually one female and several males are reproductively active and the nonbreeding individuals care for the young or protects and provides for the group - human are eusocial

Explain infanticide

- long considered a pathological behavior and not adaptive until 1970's - in langur monkeys it was thought that overcrowding triggered agressive behaviour - Sarah Hrdy conducted work on whether overcrowding caused infanticide in langurs - adaptive behaviour due to natural selection

Explain haplodiplod breeding systems

- males are haploid, produced from unfertilized eggs of queen - females are diploid, produced from fertilized eggs by sperm stored in spermatheca as the egg passes down oviduct - all sperm genetically identical - queen decides if egg is fertilized - since father only produced one type of gamete, mother and daughter will have 1/2 of chromosomes in common in all cases - genetic relatedness between sisters of a monogamous female will be at least 50% since male will only contribute one type of chromosome - sisters with same father have coefficient of relatedness of 3/4 instead of 1/2 in most diploid species - greater aultruistic behaviour between haplodiploid species because higher average relatedness between sisters

Explain lek polygyny in hammer headed bats

- males gather in groups along riverbanks each defending display territory high in a tree - Receptive females fly to lek and visit several males - 6% of males in lek are responsible for 80% of matings

Explain the haplodiploid hypothesis of eusociality

- many eusocial Hymenoptera with haplodiploid sex determination and with female only parental care via sister workers - expect sisters would favor sisters over brothers since they are more related to sisters - expect more sisters in colony - no such bias for queen - find 3:1 ratio of female to male which is favourable to workers not the 1:1 ratio expected if queen was in complete control - fitness interests of workers win out over fitness interests of queen

Explain intrasexual selection

- members of one sex compete for access to other sex - More common between males then between females - Common consequences are evolution of large body size and evolution of weaponry through convergent evolution - Sometimes competition is about access to mates, other times it is about establishing dominance - High ranking individuals are awarded reproductively and genetically making dominance adaptive

Explain sexual selection and competition for mates

- most species males with tiny sperm have very large potential reproductive success - Whether males reach potential depends upon how many eggs they fertilize which requires them to compete with other males - Darwin suggests that evolutionary change can be driven by sexual selection - Sexual selection is advantage to which certain individuals have over others of the same sex and species in exclusive relation to reproduction - Winners of male-male competition mate more often

Define fitness cost

- negative effect of a trait on number of surviving offspring produced by an individual - reduction in number of copies of individuals alleles that it contribute to next generation

Explain heritable personality traits in humans

- neuroticism - extraversion - openness - agreeableness - conscientiousness - all are highly heritable with heritabilities ranging from 40-60% - differences in dopamine receptors make differences in extraversion and openness - heritability of intelligence is 40-80% - environment and genes interact together to determine behavioural traits

Explain how the by product hypothesis would be tested

- parents have high prolactin levels - Prolactin promotes parental behavior - Prolactin should be the same in all individuals weather or not they are reproducing - If helping is a hardwired behavior there should not be high prolactin levels in helpers - If helping is an adaptive behavior there should be high prolactin levels - Tests show high prolactin levels in helpers before kids show up indicating an adaptive inclusive fitness behavior - Evidence against the by-product hypothesis

Explain the history of behavioural traits and phylogenic trees

- reconstruct evolutionary history of a behavioural trait using Darwin's theory of decent with modification - characteristics of living species are products of gradual changes in traits of the ancestors of todays organisms - phylogeny/evolutionary tree - phylogenic trees can be drawn on basis of anatomical, physiological, molecular or behaviours comparisons - tell viewer which modern species has been last modified over evolutionary time

Explain the evolution of sterile worker castes

- social insect colonies are extended families - when sterile members of group help others survive to reproduce the helpers are helping to maintain family traits - unusual degree of relatedness of workers in haplodiploid breeding systems

When should group selection theory be used to explain complex social behavior instead of kin selection?

- social insects that live in colonies are ideal candidates for group selection - colonies with more self sacrificing individuals will be favoured by group selection if groups with more altruists outcompete rival groups and so contribute more genes to the next generation

Explain sexual suicide

- some cases nuptial gift is individual itself - Male redback spiders make it easy for female to eat them, as he transfers sperm he performs somersault throwing his body into partners jaws - Female eats male 2/3 of the time - Males break off sperm transferring appendage inside of female reducing chance that another male can mate with her - Cannibalized males fertilize more eggs then uneaten males - Once he has lost his penis he can never reproduce again so there is no point in living - Many spiders are captured by predators before they find a female meaning that odds of finding a second mate are extremely low should male survive first mating

Explain obligate altruists

- some social insect workers are capable of selfish reproduction - other helpers have little chance of personal reproduction and are obligate altruists - example of kin selection - anatomy and behavior of sterile castes with undeveloped ovaries often reveal extreme specialization for self sacrifice, choice of individual to not develop ovaries

Explain the differential reproductive success requirement for natural selection

- some variations result in more surviving offspring then others - assume that whatever trait exist today must have won a reproductive competition in the past - better reproducers cause a species to evolve - only hereditary characteristics that become more common in a species are those that promote individual reproductive success not necessarily benefiting species as a whole

Explain the song producing mechanisms of male Plainfin midshipman fish

- sonic muscles control movement of swim bladder controlling fishs ability to sing - bladder serves as drum, rhythmic contractions of muscles beat the drum - muscle contractions require signals from motor neurons which are connected to sonic muscles - studied by Andrew Bass and colleagues who mapped the sonic control system - found two clusters of interrelated neurons that generate the signal controlling the coordinated muscle contractions required for humming

Explain kin or indirect selection

- the process that occurs when hereditarily distinctive individuals differ in the number of nondescendant relatives they help survive to reproduce - set of relatives - what you do to help produce more close relatives - what you do to harm close relatives

Explain female preferences and song learning in male birds

- ultimate hypothesis is that song learning is function of social environment provided by females - Females are intended recipients of some songs - Females like males that have larger repitoir - One hypothesis is females select males with same natal song type as this indicates that he is from the population adapted to local conditions - Songs are way of indicating where you came from, if you have shared genes with other individuals - cassins finches when female disappears leaving her partner without a mate, the number of songs he sings and the time he spends singing increases dramtically - Male cassins finches sing to attract females - When male is paired off with female he sings relatively little - Loss of potential mate stimulates male to sing

Explain sacrifices by social insect workers

- when honey bee stings the bee dies after leaving stinger and poison in victim - nasuter termite colony soldiers attack intruders and spray sticky repellents stores in glands, sticky repellent will trap enemies but also themselves so they sacrifice their lives for the benefit of the colony as a whole

Explain the adaptive values to choosy females

Healthy mates - exaderated traits determative of male health - unhealthy male would not be able to produce exaderated traits - females would not be infected with parasites Good genes - males with exaderated traits have good genes they can pass on to offspring Runaway selection - genetic hardwire in females to prefer males with certain traits - cause traits to be exaderated in males until natural selection/survival stops it from running away too far Chaseaway selection - if male trait has no benefit and is only selected by prexisting bias the female may pay a cost - due to costs to female a resistance to the trait will form which therefore causes exaduration of trait

Why do birds learn songs

Hypothesis 1: Learning allows for adoption to local conditions - Ex. Great tit songs in open woodlands vs dense forests - Great tits from dense forests produce pure whitstles of relatively low frequency so it will travel further - Males of same species that live in more open woodlands use more and higher sound frequencies in their more complex songs - Low frequency of traffic forces birds to use higher frequency song Hypothesis 2: better communication with rivals - benefits of song learning centers on the advantages of matching songs to the singers social environement - Males able to learn local dialects can communicate better with rivals that will also be singing that particular learned song variant

Explain killer katydid

Katydids use acoustical sexual deception to attract male cicadas to capture and eat

Explain honest signals in barking gecko

Larger the male the lower the frequency of calls

define sexual selected infanticide

males perform infanticide towards offspring of females they want to mate with