Animal Behavior Notes!

Foraging Behaviors

• Herds, flocks, & schools
• Most in a group are hidden
• Individuals in the group can trade off jobs (foraging and watching for predators)
• Can mob their predator and protect their young
• Packs
• Corner and attack prey with much success

• Packs against packs

Social Behavior

• Interactions between individuals
• Develop as evolutionary adaptations
• Communication/language
• Agonistic Behaviors
• Dominance Hierarchy
• Cooperation
• Altruistic Behavior

Communication/Language

• Two major discoveries about honey bees.
• First, he demonstrated that honey bees have color vision.

• Karl von Frisch

• He trained bees to feed on a dish of sugar water set on a colored card. He then set the colored card in the middle of an array of gray-toned cards

• State a null hypothesis and an alternative hypothesis

• Watch Bee Dance video

• Second, he showed that honey bees use a dance language to communicate food locations to other bees.

Communication by song

• Species identification & mating ritual
• Mixed learned & innate
• Critical learning period

• Mating ritual & song
• Innate, genetically controlled

Agonistic behaviors

• Lizard Behavior

• Competition for food, mates, or territory

• Threatening & submissive rituals
• -symbolic, usually no harm done

Dominance hierarchy

• Indicate power and status relationships among individuals in a group.
• -minimizes fighting for food
• and mates

Altruistic Behavior

• kin selection
• increasing survival of close relatives passes these genes on to the next generation

• How can this be of adaptive value?

• Warning Calls

• In naked mole rat populations
• Nonreproductive individuals may sacrifice their lives protecting the reproductive individuals from predators

• Figure 51.33

Communication by scent

• Female mosquito use CO2 concentrations to locate victims

• Spider using moth sex pheromones, to lure its prey

• When a minnow or catfish is injured: An alarm substance in the fish’s skin disperses in the water, inducing a fright response among fish in the area

Christian The Lion