Exam 50: Behavioral Ecology

Homing pigeons' ability to always return to their home, no matter where they are released, is an excellent example of ________.

During a field trip, an instructor touched a moth resting on a tree trunk. The moth raised its forewings to reveal large eyespots on its hind wings. The instructor asked why the moth lifted its wings. One student answered that sensory receptors had fired and triggered a neuronal reflex culminating in the contraction of certain muscles. A second student responded that the behavior might frighten predators. Which statement best describes these explanations?

In the second year of its life a pied kingfisher mates and raises two of its own offspring. What is its direct fitness in this second year of its life?

Karl von Frisch demonstrated that European honeybees communicate the location of a distant food source by ________.

A female cat in heat urinates more often and in many places. Male cats are attracted to the urine deposits. Which of the following is a proximate cause of this increased urination?

Recent research has shown that von Frisch was not completely correct about the difference between the round dance and waggle dance. The new information suggests that in honeybees, the ________.

In testing a hypothesis that "territorial defense in European robins is a fixed action pattern that is released by the sight of orange feathers," researchers found that robins defended their territory by attacking anything that was of similar size and had an orange patch. What experiment would you perform next to determine that the color initiated the defense response?

Any process in which a signal from one individual modifies the behavior of a recipient individual is termed ________.

Which of the following statements about evolution of behavior is correct?

If a prairie dog had the opportunity to perform an altruistic act (that is, give an alarm call) to help its relatives, which combination of the following relatives would the prairie dog be most likely to help (base your answer solely on the genetic relationships)?

Learning has the most influence on behavior when ________.

Which of the following is TRUE of innate behaviors? Innate behaviors ________.

Upon returning to its hive, a European honeybee communicates to other worker bees the presence of a nearby food source it has discovered by ________.

Which of the following examples describes a behavioral pattern that results from a proximate cause?

Which of the following is required for a behavioral trait to evolve by natural selection?

Scientists believe that the direction birds go when migrating is guided in part by ________. I. the stars in the night sky II. the Sun during the day III. the magnetic field of the Earth

With regard to understanding the evolution of cooperation, the principal prediction that can be made from the expression Br > C is that ________.

In the accompanying figure, which of the following conclusions is most logical based on the data?

A pied kingfisher in its first year of life helps in the feeding of three full siblings who would not have survived without the helper's efforts. What is its indirect fitness in its first year?

Use the following information to answer the following question(s). The following are an abstract and figure from a paper that explores the evolutionary relationship between a protein kinase and behavior (M. Fitzpatrick and M. Sokolowski. 2004. In search of food: Exploring the evolutionary link between cGMP-dependent protein kinase (PKG) and behavior. Integrative and Comparative Biology 44:28-36). Abstract: Despite an immense amount of variation in organisms throughout the animal kingdom, many of their genes show substantial conservation in DNA sequence and protein function. Here we explore the potential for a conserved evolutionary relationship between genes and their behavioral phenotypes. We investigate the evolutionary history of cGMP-dependent protein kinase (PKG) and its possible conserved function in food-related behaviors. First identified for its role in the foraging behavior of fruit flies, the PKG encoded by the foraging gene had since been associated with the maturation of behavior (from nurse to forager) in honey bees and the roaming and dwelling food-related locomotion in nematodes. These parallels encouraged us to construct protein phylogenies using 32 PKG sequences that include 19 species. Our analyses suggest five possible evolutionary histories that can explain the apparent conserved link between PKG and behavior in fruit flies, honey bees, and nematodes. Three of these raise the hypothesis that PKG influences the food-related behaviors of a wide variety of animals including vertebrates. Moreover it appears that the PKG gene was duplicated some time between the evolution of nematodes and a common ancestor of vertebrates and insects whereby current evidence suggests only the for-like PKG might be associated with food-related behavior. These are neighbor joining trees that depict the evolutionary relationships of 32 PKG kinase domain and C-terminal amino acid sequences spanning 19 species of protozoans and metazoans. Values at the nodes represent the results of 5000 bootstrap replications. Lineages with known behavioral links with PKG are indicated by gray branches. -Using the figure and the accompanying paragraph, and knowing that the PKG encoded by the foraging gene has recently been associated with the maturation of out-of-nest behavior in honeybees, what would be a logical explanation for this relationship? As animals mature, they ________.