Animal Behavior - Vocabulary Flashcards

Flashcards covering key vocabulary terms from lecture notes on animal behavior, including topics such as development of behavior, biological clocks, orientation and navigation, spatial distribution, foraging, antipredator behaviors, and reproductive behaviors.

Play

A range of voluntary, intrinsically motivated activities normally associated with recreational pleasure and enjoyment.

Sensitive Period

A period of time when an individual is more receptive to specific types of environmental stimuli.

Critical Period

A phase of susceptibility to environmental stimuli that was brief, well-defined, and would result in behavioral transformation.

Imprinting

Any type of rapid learning that occurs in a particular life stage and occurs independently of the outcome of behavior.

Filial Imprinting

When a young animal learns to preferentially follow its mother.

Sexual Imprinting

When a young animal learns the characteristics of a desired mate.

Maternal Attachment

An imprinting-like behavior in which a lasting bond is established between the mother and her young.

Maternal Responsiveness

The display of maternal behavior when the mother is in the presence of her young.

Maternal Selectivity

The display of maternal behavior only towards the mother’s own offspring.

Brood Care

Parental care in a number of animal species with a large number of offspring.

Biological Clock

Allows an animal to keep time, to synchronize itself to cyclical environmental variables that are important for its existence.

Endogenous

The ability to control metabolic cycles even in the absence of environmental cues.

Free Running

Duration of a biological rhythm in the absence of environmental cues.

Entrainment

When rhythmic physiological or behavioral events match their period and phase to that environmental oscillation.

Q10 Temperature Coefficient

A measure of the circadian periodicity over a range of physiological temperatures.

Diurnal

Daytime active.

Nocturnal

Nighttime active.

Crepuscular

Active at dawn and dusk.

Circalunal Rhythms

Syncronized to the waxing and waning of the moon that forms a lunar month.

Circatidal Rhythms

Cycles synchronized by the tides.

Circannual Rhythms

Synchronized with a 365-day year.

Melatonin

A hormone that serves a role in entrainment.

Piloting

The ability of an animal to find its way using landmarks.

Compass Orientation

The ability of an animal to find its way without using landmarks.

Vector Navigation

An inherited program telling an animal the compass direction to head in and for how long to travel.

Path Integration

The process by which an animal integrates information on the sequence of direction and duration of each leg of an outward journey and uses that information to return.

True Navigation

An animal’s ability to maintain or establish reference to a goal, regardless of its location, without the use of landmarks.

Landmarks

A recognizable cue that can be stored quickly in an animal’s memory to guide it on a later journey.

Magnetic Map

Allows an animal to obtain positional information from the Earth’s magnetic field.

Magnetic Signposts

An animal’s innate ability to respond to magnetic landmarks that will trigger a directional change.

Magnetoception

Allows an animal to detect a magnetic field to allow it to perceive direction, altitude, or location.

Light-Dependent Magnetoception

Allows for the detection of magnetic fields. (Cryptochrome)

Papi’s “Mosaic” Model

Animals construct a map from the distribution of environmental odors.

Wallraff’s “Gradient” Model

Proposes the existence of long-range, stable atmospheric odor gradients.

Established that bees can accurately identify the direction and range from the hive to a food source.

Karl von Frisch

Sun Compass

Animals that use the position of the sun.

Star Compass

Animals that use the stars/night sky.

Polarity Compass

Animals shown to use polarity to allow them to distinguish north from south.

Inclination Compass

Animals that use inclination (The line of force makes on the horizon)

Natal Philopatry

When offspring remain within their birth area throughout their lives.

Natal Dispersal

When offspring leave their birth area upon reaching maturity.

Public Information

Animals evaluate certain characteristics of conspecifics.

Comparison Tactic

Involves visiting several areas, revisiting some of the more eligible ones, and then choosing the area determined to be of the highest quality.

The Sequential Search Tactic

Involves visiting an area, evaluating whether to reject or accept it, and moving on if it is rejected.

Natal Habitat Preference Induction

Helps dispersers find a suitable habitat more quickly, thereby reducing the potential costs of the search.

Two-way Migration

Involves leaving an area and then later returning to it.

One-way Migration

Involves leaving the home range for a new location and never returning to the original home range.

Obligate Migration

Individuals must migrate.

Facultative Migration

Individuals can choose to migrate or not.

Complete Migration

Individuals in a given population migrate.

Partial Migration

Some individuals migrate while others don’t.

Differential Migration

Migratory and non-migratory individuals are based on factors such as sex or age.

Multigenerational Migration

Takes more than one generation to complete.

Daily Migration

Occur regularly in a 24-hour period.

Vertical Migration

Individuals migrate up and down the water column.

Irruptions

Irregular migration occurred under the pressure of famine, overpopulation of a locality, or some more obscure influence.

Omnivores

Animals whose diet is not specialized to process either animal or plant matter, but instead can process both.

Suspension Feeding

Removal of small food particles that are suspended in the water.

Herbivores

Animals whose diets are based on plant matter.

Carnivores

Animals whose diets are based on animal matter.

Pursuit

When a predator pursues prey animals.

Stealth Tactics

Predators use stealth to capture prey animals by sneaking up on them before initiating chase.

Aggressive Mimicry

Allows a predator to mimic a signal that will either attract the prey or allow the predator to be ignored by the prey.

Traps

Predators manipulate their environment to capture or restrain prey.

Foraging

The act of searching for and exploiting food resources.

Foraging Theory

A branch of behavioral ecology that studies the foraging behavior of animals in response to the environment where the animal lives.

Optimal Foraging Theory

An idea in ecology based on the study of foraging behavior and states that organisms forage in such a way as to maximize their net energy intake per unit time.

Optimal Diet Model

Analyzes the behavior of a forager that encounters different types of prey and must choose which to attack.

Path Selection Model

Describes the behavior of a forager whose food is concentrated in small areas known as patches with a significant travel time between them.

Foraging Innovation

An animal consuming new food or using a new foraging technique.

Solitary Foraging

When animals find, capture, and consume their prey alone.

Group Foraging

When animals find, capture, and consume prey in the presence of other individuals.

Scramble Competition

Each individual strives to get a portion of a shared resource.

Interference Competition

When the presence of competitors prevents a forager’s accessibility to resources.

Camouflage

A set of methods of concealment that allows otherwise visible animals to remain unnoticed by blending with their environment or by resembling something else.

Crypsis

Blending with the background, making the animal hard to see.

Masquerade

The whole animal looks like some other object, which is of no special interest to the observing animal.

Polymorphism

Occurs when two or more clearly different phenotypes exist in the same population of a species.

Decoration Behavior

Animals make themselves cryptic by using materials from their environment, such as twigs, sand, or pieces of shell, to conceal their outlines.

Countershading

Uses graded color to create the illusion of flatness.

Chromatophores

Animal specialized cells that can rapidly change color and pattern.

Motion Camouflage

A type of camouflage by which an object can approach a target while appearing to remain stationary from the perspective of the target.

Disruptive Colorization

Coloration designed to prevent to perception of an animal’s form.

Dazzle Pattern

Type of disruptive coloration that actually works better when the animal is in motion. (Distorts the perception of size and range of the animal)

Aposematism

A family of antipredator adaptations where a warning signal is associated with the unprofitability of a prey item to potential predators.

Mullerian Mimicry

A form of mimicry when two or more poisonous species, that may or may not be closely related and share one or more common predators, have come to mimic each other’s warning signals.

Batesian Mimicry

A form of mimicry where a harmless species has evolved to imitate the warning signals of a harmful species directed at a common predator.

Autotomy

The act where an animal loses one or more of its own body parts, usually as a self-defense mechanism designed to elude a predator’s grasp.

False Heads

A strategy of making a less vulnerable portion of the body look like its head.

Faking Death or Injury

Can be used to lure a predator away from a nest.

Eyespots

Can be used to scare off predators.

Stotting

Jumping into the air with the legs straight and stiff, and the white rear fully visible.

Mobbing Behavior

When members of a species drive away their predator by cooperatively attacking or harassing it.

Alarm Signals

An antipredator adaptation referring to various signals emitted by social animals in response to danger.

Predator Satiation

An antipredator adaptation in which prey occur at high population densities, reducing the probability of an individual organism being eaten.

Selfish Herd

An antipredator mechanism that considers the spatial arrangement of individuals within the group.

Confusion Effect

A group-mediated antipredatory technique in which a predator would be less successful targeting and capturing one prey item in a group.

Intrasexual Selection

Members of the same gender are competing to mate with the opposite gender.

Intersexual Selection

Members of the opposite gender influence the characteristics of the other gender through sexual selextion.

Bateman’s Principle

The theory by A.J. Bateman that states that females almost always invest more energy into producing offspring than males invest, and therefore most species females are a limiting resource over which the other sex will compete.