Wildlife Behavior and Ecology Lecture Notes

Flashcards covering the terminology, theories, and specific animal examples discussed in the lecture on wildlife behavior and its applications to conservation and management.

Ethology

The scientific study of animal behavior.

Critical day length

An internal trigger or cue based on the number of hours of daylight that tells organisms when to perform specific behaviors, such as leafing out or migrating; it is notably unaffected by climate change.

Proximate causes

The immediate mechanisms, such as endocrine or hormonal processes, that allow a behavior to take place or trigger it in the moment.

Ultimate explanations

Explanations that address why a behavior exists from an evolutionary perspective and how it evolved over time.

Comparative study

An approach to studying behavior by taking two or more closely related species or groups and looking at their similarities and differences.

Economic models

Ways of looking at behavior through a cost-benefit assessment, assuming animals make trade-offs to behave in the most profitable way, maximizing energy gain while minimizing risk.

Optimal foraging theory

An economic model predicting that animals adopt foraging strategies that provide the most energy gain for the lowest energy cost, where net energy equals $gain - cost$.

Evolutionarily stable strategies (ESS)

A behavioral phenotype that, once established in a population, cannot be replaced by any other strategy because it provides the best outcome as long as everyone else is doing it.

Oxytocin and Vasopressin

Neuropeptides produced in the pituitary gland that affect social processes in mammals; in Prairie Voles, the density of receptors for these hormones is linked to monogamous behavior.

Infanticide

The act of killing offspring, which in some species drives behaviors like mate guarding or staying at the nest to protect the young.

Divergent evolution

The process where closely related species evolve different behaviors or traits, such as ground-nesting gulls displaying mobbing behavior while cliff-nesting Kittywakes do not.

Convergent evolution

The process where distantly related or unrelated species evolve similar characteristics, such as inking in Mollusca or aposematic coloring, due to shared environmental pressures.

Batesian mimicry

A form of deceptive signaling where a non-venomous or non-toxic species (the faker) mimics the appearance of a dangerous species to avoid predation.

Mullerian mimicry

A signaling strategy where multiple toxic or unpalatable species evolve to look identical, effectively training shared predators across a wide geographic area to avoid them.

Negative frequency dependence

A situation where the success of a strategy (like Batesian mimicry) depends on it being rare in the population; if too many individuals fake a signal, predators eventually learn it is not honest.

Honest signaling

A morphological trait or behavior that serves as a truthful display of an individual's strength, endurance, or ability to defend itself, such as push-ups in lizards or pronking in springboks.

Pronking (or stotting)

An energetic behavior in species like springboks where individuals jump high into the air as an honest signal to predators that they are fast and difficult to catch.

Countershading

A common coloration pattern where an animal is light on the bottom and dark on top, making it less visible to predators from above and below.

Brood parasitism (Nest parasitism)

A reproductive strategy, seen in species like Cuckoos and Cowbirds, where females lay eggs in the nests of other birds to offload the costs of incubation and parental care.

Imprinting

A form of early-life learning where an animal forms a strong attachment or identity based on the first thing it sees or hears, famously studied by Konrad Lorenz with geese.

Sexual selection

A special case of natural selection driven by male-male competition or female choice, often favoring traits that increase mating success even if they carry a survival cost.

Runaway selection

A process where a female preference for a male trait and the trait itself reinforce each other over generations until the trait becomes extremely exaggerated, such as the peacock's tail.

Polygyny

A mating system where one male mates with multiple females.

Polyandry

A mating system where one female mates with multiple males, such as in the Galapagos hawk or Jacanas.

Eusociality

The highest level of social organization, defined by cooperative offspring care, overlapping generations, and a rigid division of labor with reproductive and sterile castes.

Indirect fitness

Genetic success achieved by helping first-order relatives (who share on average $50\%$ of one's genes) to survive and reproduce.

Prosocial behavior

Voluntary actions in social species where individuals help others with the expectation of a return benefit, seen in species without rigid castes like coyotes or bluebirds.

Pseudopenis

An extended clitoris in female spotted hyenas through which they give birth; it is a costly morphological trait linked to high testosterone levels that enhance aggression and social status.

Sensitivity analysis

A method in population modeling used to determine how a change in a single vital rate, such as adult female survivorship, impacts the overall population multiplier ($\lambda$).