Video Notes: Migration Forecasts, Twin Heritability, and Animal Behavior (Vocabulary Flashcards)

Vocabulary flashcards covering key terms and concepts from the video notes on bird migration forecasting, heritability and twin studies, cross-fostering imprinting, snake prey preferences, and related predator–prey examples.

BirdCast

A tool from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology that provides forecasts and maps of nocturnal bird migration, indicating when, where, and how far birds are predicted to migrate.

Nocturnal migration

Bird migration that occurs at night; BirdCast forecasts show nocturnal movement a few hours after local sunset and update every 6 hours.

Migration forecast maps

Visual maps displaying predicted nocturnal bird migration for a region, updated periodically.

Migration Dashboard

A BirdCast interface to explore nightly migration data for a chosen region and time.

344 million birds predicted

A forecast value indicating the estimated number of birds migrating on a given night.

Cross-fostering

An experimental design where offspring are raised by parents of another species or genetic background to separate environmental and genetic effects.

Sexual imprinting

The development of mate preferences based on early life environmental exposure, interacting with genetics.

Great tits (GT)

Parus major, a bird species used in imprinting and mating studies.

Blue tits (BT)

Cyanistes caeruleus, a related bird species used alongside GT in cross-fostering experiments.

Heritability (A)

Proportion of phenotypic variance attributable to additive genetic factors.

Shared environment (C)

Environmental influences that twins share, contributing to similarity.

Nonshared environment (E)

Environmental influences unique to each individual that contribute to differences.

SNP heritability

Heritability estimated from genome-wide SNP data (e.g., GCTA), reflecting additive genetic variance captured by SNPs.

Twin heritability

Heritability estimated from comparisons of monozygotic and dizygotic twins to partition variance into A, C, and E.

GCTA (Genome-wide Complex Trait Analysis)

A method to estimate SNP-based heritability using large-scale genomic data.

Developmental change in intelligence heritability

In twin data, the heritability of intelligence increases from childhood through adolescence to young adulthood; shared environmental influence decreases; nonshared remains unchanged.

Tongue flicks per minute

A behavioral measure of how often a snake flicks its tongue per minute to sample prey scents.

Banana slug (coastal prey)

A coastal prey item for Western Garter Snakes; differences in prey preference across populations suggest a genetic basis.

Darwin's Ark

A pet community science project inviting the public to contribute to research on pets and their health.

Brown widow spider (Latrodectus geometricus)

A spider capable of preying on relatively large organisms, illustrating predator-prey interactions with snakes.