Animal Behavior: Predator Avoidance, Foraging, and Habitat Selection

Comprehensive practice flashcards defining core vocabulary, evolutionary hypotheses, and mathematical models across predator avoidance, optimal foraging, and habitat selection.

Game Theory

A mathematical framework that emphasizes the dynamics of behavioral interactions between different individuals or species to predict how an individual should behave in a given context.

Optimality Theory

An approach predicting that individuals filter through candidate options to choose behaviors that maximize fitness benefits while minimizing energetic and survival costs, typically evaluated irrespective of what others are doing.

Mobbing

An active social antipredator behavior where multiple individuals of a population harass or deter a potential predator using acoustic warnings, physical intimidation, or recruitment calls.

Predator Distraction Hypothesis

The hypothesis proposing that mobbing potential predators distracts them from depredating nests or attacking offspring.

Shared Vigilance

An antipredator behavior in social groups where multiple individuals contribute to scanning their surroundings, allowing each individual to reduce personal vigilance time without elevating predation risk.

Many Eyes Hypothesis

The hypothesis stating that associating in groups increases the probability that an approaching predator will be detected early by at least one group member.

Sentinel Vigilance

A specialized antipredator behavior in cooperative, kin-based social groups where a single individual acts as a dedicated lookout while others forage.

Selfish, State-Dependent Hypothesis

The hypothesis stating that sentinel duty depends on an individual's current energetic reserves, predicting that individuals take up sentinel duty only when fully satiated.

Kin-Selection Hypothesis (Sentinel Vigilance)

The hypothesis stating that sentinels accept personal survival risks primarily to protect relatives, thereby increasing their own indirect fitness.

Dilution Effect Hypothesis

A passive social defense hypothesis positing that grouping together decreases the probability that any specific individual is singled out and depredated.

Confusion Effect Hypothesis

The hypothesis proposing that synchronized, collective movement of a group of prey reduces a predator's capture efficiency by hindering its cognitive ability to track a single target.

Selfish Herd Hypothesis

The hypothesis stating that individuals within a group position other individuals between themselves and an approaching predator to reduce their individual domain of danger.

Cryptic Coloration

Pigmentation adaptations that prevent visual detection of an organism by an observer.

Background Matching

A cryptic coloration strategy where an animal replicates the ambient hue, lightness, and geometry of its substrate to lower its signal-to-noise ratio against the background.

Disruptive Coloration

A camouflage strategy utilizing high-contrast patterns along body edges to visually disrupt recognizable body outlines and boundaries.

Masquerade

A solitary defense where an organism morphologically resembles an uninteresting or inedible object (such as a stick or leaf), preventing cognitive recognition rather than sensory detection.

Countershading

A cryptic coloration grading pattern featuring a dark dorsal surface and a light ventral surface, neutralizing shadows cast by overhead natural lighting.

Aposematic Coloration

Conspicuous, bright warning pigmentation that alerts predators to an animal's noxious chemical defenses or unpalatability.

Batesian Mimicry

A form of mimicry in which a harmless or palatable species evolves conspicuous color patterns resembling a noxious model species to deter predators through deception.

Müllerian Mimicry

A form of honest mimicry where two or more unpalatable or toxic species share similar warning signals, reducing the per-capita number of individuals sacrificed to train naive predators.

Signal Deception Hypothesis

The hypothesis that a prey's coloration or behavior activates escape or avoidance behavior in an attacking predator by mimicking a threat to that predator.

Stotting

A conspicuous leap performed several feet into the air with an arched back and flared white rump patch by Thomson's gazelles (Eudorcas thomsonii) in the presence of predators.

Attack Deterrence Hypothesis

The hypothesis stating that conspicuous displays (such as stotting) signal an individual's physical vigor and stamina to predators to persuade them to abandon an energetically wasteful hunt.

Anti-Ambush Hypothesis

The hypothesis stating that prey perform conspicuous jumping or scanning behaviors upon sighting a predator to check for additional hidden predators lying in ambush.

Social Cohesion Hypothesis

The hypothesis proposing that conspicuous signals are produced to draw conspecifics together so they flee collectively as a unified group.

Alarm Signal Hypothesis

The hypothesis stating that an individual emits a conspicuous antipredator behavior to communicate imminent predation risk to nearby conspecifics.

Search Image

A mental perceptual template that an animal refines through repeated encounters with a specific prey type, increasing prey detection rates over time.

Feature-based Attention Hypothesis

A hypothesis proposing that search images are formed when foragers focus visual attention on one or two salient identifying features of a prey item, such as color, movement, or pattern.

Holistic Representation Hypothesis

A hypothesis proposing that an animal's search image consists of a cognitive representation of the entire prey item rather than isolated individual features.

Gongylidia

Nutrient-rich, swollen hyphal tips produced by fungi cultivated in leafcutter ant nests that are harvested and eaten by the ants.

Optimal Foraging Theory (OFT)

A framework of mathematical models predicting how animals maximize fitness by obtaining the highest net energy gain per unit time while minimizing foraging costs and mortality risk.

Profitability (Prey)

The net energy yielded by a prey item divided by the handling time required to consume it ($\frac{e_i}{h_i}$).

Handling Time ($h_i$)

The total duration an animal spends capturing, subduing, preparing, and ingesting a single prey item once it has been found.

Optimal Diet Model

A model predicting prey choice that shows a predator should specialize solely on the most profitable prey type (Prey 1) when $\lambda_1 > \frac{e_2}{e_1 h_2 - e_2 h_1}$, irrespective of the abundance of Prey 2.

Marginal Value Theorem (MVT)

An optimal patch residence model predicting that a forager should leave a patch when its instantaneous rate of energy gain drops to the average rate of energy gain for the overall environment.

Optimal Patch Residence Time

The predicted amount of time an animal should forage within a food patch before departing, which increases as travel time between patches increases.

Risk (Foraging Context)

The degree of statistical variance in prey availability or resource yield within a foraging site.

Risk-Prone Behavior

A preference for variable food patches with fluctuating yields, characteristic of starving foragers with a convex utility function where each additional food item offers accelerating value.

Risk-Averse Behavior

A preference for constant, reliable food patches with predictable yields, characteristic of satiated foragers with a concave utility function where each additional item has diminishing marginal value.

Risk-Indifferent Behavior

A foraging state where an animal exhibits no preference between variable and constant reward sources, driven by a linear utility function where every food item provides equal value.

Habitat Choice

The non-random distribution of animals in space and time relative to key environmental resources such as food, shelter, mates, and microclimate.

Home Range

An established area of space within familiar geographic boundaries that an animal restricts its movements to in order to meet metabolic, energetic, and physiological demands.

Minimum Convex Polygon (MCP)

A geometric method for estimating an animal's home range by constructing the smallest convex polygon enclosing all spatial coordinate observations.

Nomadic Movement

An irregular, wide-ranging pattern of space use lacking fixed seasonal return paths or predictable geographic fidelity.

Migration

The regular, predictable, and directional seasonal movement of individuals between geographically distinct regions.

Ideal Free Distribution (IFD) Model

A habitat selection model predicting that individuals distribute across patches in proportion to available resources without movement costs or competition interference, equalizing average per-capita fitness across all occupied habitats.

Resource Matching Rule

The IFD equilibrium prediction that the ratio of competitors inhabiting two separate habitats equals the ratio of resources available in those habitats ($\frac{R_1}{N_1} = \frac{R_2}{N_2}$).

Ideal Despotic Distribution (IDD) Model

A modified habitat distribution model accounting for territorial aggression and dominance, in which established individuals monopolize high-quality patches and force subordinates into inferior patches, resulting in unequal fitness.

Territoriality

The occupation and active defense of a localized area against conspecific or heterospecific intruders to ensure exclusive access to mates, food, or shelter.

Economic Feasibility (Territory Defense)

The state where defending a designated geographic boundary provides net fitness benefits exceeding the costs of defense ($B > C$).

Satellite

An intruder tolerated within a territory by the resident territory owner, often tolerated during high food abundance because it helps repel other intruders.

Conditional Cooperation

Cooperative interactions in which an individual's helpful behavior or tolerance is maintained only as long as its partner continues to contribute.

Byproduct Mutualism

A cooperative scenario wherein an individual performs a selfish act that incidentally confers fitness benefits to an interacting partner.

Conspecific Cueing Hypothesis

The hypothesis proposing that inexperienced individuals evaluate the potential quality of an unfamiliar habitat or territory by observing the presence and territory choices of conspecifics.