WBehavioral ecology, also spelled behavioural ecology, is the study of the evolutionary basis for animal behavior due to ecological pressures. Behavioral ecology emerged from ethology after Niko Tinbergen outlined four questions to address when studying animal behaviors: What are the proximate causes, ontogeny, survival value, and phylogeny of a behavior?
WAn allomone is a type of semiochemical produced and released by an individual of one species that affects the behaviour of a member of another species to the benefit of the originator but not the receiver. Production of allomones is a common form of defence, particularly by plant species against insect herbivores.
WThe Elgin Center is a non-profit research center which specializes in zoosemiotics, or animal communication. The Elgin Center carries out research in the wild (in Nicaragua at The Maderas rainforest conservancy, in a lab (where the center performs anatomical studies on animal brains with regard to language areas, and in a semi-free ranging environment.
WEusociality, the highest level of organization of sociality, is defined by the following characteristics: cooperative brood care, overlapping generations within a colony of adults, and a division of labor into reproductive and non-reproductive groups. The division of labor creates specialized behavioral groups within an animal society which are sometimes called castes. Eusociality is distinguished from all other social systems because individuals of at least one caste usually lose the ability to perform at least one behavior characteristic of individuals in another caste.
WFlower constancy or pollinator constancy is defined as the tendency of individual pollinators to exclusively visit certain flower species or morphs within a species, bypassing other available flower species that could potentially be more rewarding. Flower constancy is different from other types of insect specialization such as innate preferences for certain colors or flower types, or the tendency of pollinators to visit the most rewarding and abundant flowers.
WFrequency-dependent foraging is defined as the tendency of an individual to selectively forage on a certain species or morph based on its relative frequency within a population. Specifically for pollinators, this refers to the tendency to visit a particular floral morph or plant species based on its frequency within the local plant community, even if nectar rewards are equivalent amongst different morphs. Pollinators that forage in a frequency-dependent manner will exhibit flower constancy for a certain morph, but the preferred floral type will be dependent on its frequency. Additionally, frequency-dependent foraging differs from density-dependent foraging as the latter considers the absolute number of certain morphs per unit area as a factor influencing pollinator choice. Although density of a morph will be related to its frequency, common morphs are still preferred when overall plant densities are high.
WMany animals, including humans, tend to live in groups, herds, flocks, bands, packs, shoals, or colonies of conspecific individuals. The size of these groups, as expressed by the number of people/etc in a group such as eight groups of nine people in each one, is an important aspect of their social environment. Group size tend to be highly variable even within the same species, thus we often need statistical measures to quantify group size and statistical tests to compare these measures between two or more samples. Group size measures are notoriously hard to handle statistically since groups sizes typically follow an aggregated (right-skewed) distribution: most groups are small, few are large, and a very few are very large.
WHelpers at the nest is a term used in behavioural ecology and evolutionary biology to describe a social structure in which juveniles and sexually mature adolescents of either one or both sexes remain in association with their parents and help them raise subsequent broods or litters, instead of dispersing and beginning to reproduce themselves. This phenomenon was first studied in birds where it occurs most frequently, but it is also known in animals from many different groups including mammals and insects. It is a simple form of co-operative breeding. The effects of helpers usually amount to a net benefit, however, benefits are not uniformly distributed by all helpers nor across all species that exhibit this behaviour. There are multiple proposed explanations for the behaviour, but its variability and broad taxonomic occurrences result in simultaneously plausible theories.
WIsland tameness is the tendency of many populations and species of animals living on isolated islands to lose their wariness of potential predators, particularly of large animals. The term is partly synonymous with ecological naïvete, which also has a wider meaning referring to the loss of defensive behaviors and adaptations needed to deal with these "new" predators. Species retain such wariness of predators that exist in their environment, for example a Hawaiian goose retains its wariness of hawks, but loses such behaviors associated with mammals or other predators not found in its historical range. The most famous example is that of the dodo, which owed its extinction in a large part to a lack of fear of humans, and many species of penguin - which, although wary of sea predators, have no real land predators and therefore are very unafraid and curious towards humans.
WThe nocturnal bottleneck hypothesis is a hypothesis to explain several mammalian traits. In 1942, Gordon Lynn Walls described this concept which states that placental mammals were mainly or even exclusively nocturnal through most of their evolutionary story, starting with their origin 225 million years ago, and only ending with the demise of the non-avian dinosaurs 66 million years ago. While some mammal groups have later evolved to fill diurnal niches, the approximately 160 million years spent as nocturnal animals has left a lasting legacy on basal anatomy and physiology, and most mammals are still nocturnal.
WNocturnality is an animal behavior characterized by being active during the night and sleeping during the day. The common adjective is "nocturnal", versus diurnal meaning the opposite.
WOptimal foraging theory (OFT) is a behavioral ecology model that helps predict how an animal behaves when searching for food. Although obtaining food provides the animal with energy, searching for and capturing the food require both energy and time. To maximize fitness, an animal adopts a foraging strategy that provides the most benefit (energy) for the lowest cost, maximizing the net energy gained. OFT helps predict the best strategy that an animal can use to achieve this goal.
WA pack hunter or social predator is a predatory animal which hunts its prey by working together with other members of its species. Normally animals hunting in this way are closely related, and with the exceptions of chimpanzees where only males normally hunt, all individuals in a family group contribute to hunting. When hunting cooperation is across two or more species, the broader term cooperative hunting is commonly used.
WAnts are simple animals and their behavioural repertory is limited to somewhere between ten and forty elementary behaviours. This is an attempt to explain the different patterns of self-organization in ants.
WThe preorbital gland is a paired exocrine gland found in many species of hoofed animals, which is homologous to the lacrimal gland found in humans. These glands are trenchlike slits of dark blue to black, nearly bare skin extending from the medial canthus of each eye. They are lined by a combination of sebaceous and sudoriferous glands, and they produce secretions which contain pheromones and other semiochemical compounds. Ungulates frequently deposit these secretions on twigs and grass as a means of communication with other animals.
WReproductive suppression involves the prevention or inhibition of reproduction in otherwise healthy adult individuals. It includes delayed sexual maturation (puberty) or inhibition of sexual receptivity, facultatively increased interbirth interval through delayed or inhibited ovulation or spontaneous or induced abortion, abandonment of immature and dependent offspring, mate guarding, selective destruction and worker policing of eggs in some eusocial insects or cooperatively breeding birds, and infanticide, and infanticide in carnivores) of the offspring of subordinate females either by directly killing by dominant females or males in mammals or indirectly through the withholding of assistance with infant care in marmosets and some carnivores. The Reproductive Suppression Model argues that "females can optimize their lifetime reproductive success by suppressing reproduction when future [physical or social] conditions for the survival of offspring are likely to be greatly improved over present ones". When intragroup competition is high it may be beneficial to suppress the reproduction of others, and for subordinate females to suppress their own reproduction until a later time when social competition is reduced. This leads to reproductive skew within a social group, with some individuals having more offspring than others. The cost of reproductive suppression to the individual is lowest at the earliest stages of a reproductive event and reproductive suppression is often easiest to induce at the pre-ovulatory or earliest stages of pregnancy in mammals, and greatest after a birth. Therefore, neuroendocrine cues for assessing reproductive success should evolve to be reliable at early stages in the ovulatory cycle. Reproductive suppression occurs in its most extreme form in eusocial insects such as termites, hornets and bees and the mammalian naked mole rat which depend on a complex division of labor within the group for survival and in which specific genes, epigenetics and other factors are known to determine whether individuals will permanently be unable to breed or able to reach reproductive maturity under particular social conditions, and cooperatively breeding fish, birds and mammals in which a breeding pair depends on helpers whose reproduction is suppressed for the survival of their own offspring. In eusocial and cooperatively breeding animals most non-reproducing helpers engage in kin selection, enhancing their own inclusive fitness by ensuring the survival of offspring they are closely related to. Wolf packs suppress subordinate breeding.
WRobosquirrel refers to several versions of robotic squirrels developed by researchers at the University of California, Davis and San Diego State University. Robosquirrel is currently in use and development in an interdisciplinary research project that uses biorobotics to investigate how communication between prey and predators evolve in response to each other. It has received extensive science and popular media coverage. It stirred controversy when Senator Tom Coburn listed it in his Wastebook 2012 as a scientific research project that wastes United States federal tax dollars. Senator Coburn's release of Wastebook 2012 was quickly picked up by the popular media and the robosquirrel project was the headline of many media stories.
WSocial Bonding and Nurture Kinship: Compatibility between Cultural and Biological Approaches is a book on human kinship and social behavior by Maximilian Holland, published in 2012. The work synthesizes the perspectives of evolutionary biology, psychology and sociocultural anthropology towards understanding human social bonding and cooperative behavior. It presents a theoretical treatment that many consider to have resolved longstanding questions about the proper place of genetic connections in human kinship and social relations, and a synthesis that "should inspire more nuanced ventures in applying Darwinian approaches to sociocultural anthropology". The book has been called "A landmark in the field of evolutionary biology" which "gets to the heart of the matter concerning the contentious relationship between kinship categories, genetic relatedness and the prediction of behavior", "places genetic determinism in the correct perspective" and serves as "a shining example of what can be achieved when excellent scholars engage fully across disciplinary boundaries."
WSociality is the degree to which individuals in an animal population tend to associate in social groups (gregariousness) and form cooperative societies.
WWorker policing is a behavior seen in colonies of social hymenopterans whereby worker females eat or remove eggs that have been laid by other workers rather than those laid by a queen. Worker policing ensures that the offspring of the queen will predominate in the group. In certain species of bees, ants and wasps, workers or the queen may also act aggressively towards fertile workers. Worker policing has been suggested as a form of coercion to promote the evolution of altruistic behavior in eusocial insect societies.