Download Chapter 51 - Madison County Schools

Chapter 51
Behavior Ecology
What is behavior?
• Animal behavior is carried out in response to
internal and external stimuli.
• It can be solitary or social, fixed or variable.
• What ever the behavior, it enables organisms
either to search for food or to find a mate.
• Animal behavior is everything an animal does
and how it does it.
• This is ethology!
Examples of behavior
• Most of what we call behavior is the visible
result of an animal’s muscular activity.
– Predator chases its prey
– Fish raises its fins as part of a territorial display
– Bird uses muscles to force air from its lungs and
shape the sounds in its throat.
Examples of behavior
• Some non-muscular activities are also
considered behaviors.
– Animal secretes a chemical that attracts members
of the opposite sex.
– We can consider learning to be a behavior
process.
• A juvenile bird may learn to reproduce a song that it
hears an adult of its species singing.
• Even though this may involve muscles the young bird
must learn the song.
Proximate and ultimate causes
• Behavior evolved because of substantial
evolutionary pressures.
• When we speak about behavior, we refer to
either the proximate or the ultimate causes of
behavior.
Proximate causes
• Are immediate, genetic, physiological,
neurological, and developmental mechanisms
that determine how an individual behaves.
• Proximate questions about behavior focus on
the environmental stimuli, if any, that trigger a
behavior, as well as the genetic, physiological,
and anatomical mechanisms underlying a
behavioral act.
Ultimate causes
• Result from the evolutionary pressures that
have fashioned an animal’s behavior.
• Ultimate questions address the evolutionary
significance of a behavior
– Why did natural selection favor this behavior and
not a different one? For example, the Galapagos
tortoise.