Behavioral Ecology and Ethology ❮ 219
❯ Answers and Explanations
❯ Rapid Review
Quickly review the following terms:
Behavioral ecology:study of interaction between animals and their environments.
Ethology:study of animal behavior.
Types of Animal Learning
- Fixed-action pattern:preprogrammed response to a stimulus (stickleback fish).
- Habituation:loss of responsiveness to unimportant stimuli or stimuli that provide no
feedback.
- Imprinting:innate behavior learned during critical period early in life (baby ducks
imprint to mama ducks).
- Associative learning:one stimulus is associated with another (classical conditioning—
Pavlov).
- Operant conditioning:trial-and-error learning (aposometric predator training).
- Insight learning:ability to reason through a problem the first time through with no
prior experience.
- Observational learning:learning by watching someone else do it first.
Types of Animal Movement
- Kinesis:change in the speed of movement in response to a stimulus. Organisms will
move faster in bad environments and slower in good environments.
- Migration:cyclic movement of animals over long distances according to the time of
year.
- Taxis:reflex movement toward or away from a stimulus.
- A—This is a fixed-action pattern—an innate
behavior that is a programmed response to a stim-
ulus that appears to be carried out without any
thought by the organisms involved.
- B—If the scientist does not allow for a period of
habituation, the behavioral observations will be
inaccurate since the behavior of the animal will
be altered by the presence of the scientist.
- D—An agonistic behavior is a contest of intimi-
dation and submission where the prize is a
desired resource. In this case, the resource is the
feeding position.
- C—Altruistic behavior cannot be expected from
two migrating individuals for a couple of rea-
sons: (a) there is no reason for either of them to
believe that they will see the other in the future,
taking the “If I help them now, perhaps they will
help me sometime in the future” element out of
play; and (2) if they are migrating in different
directions, it is reasonably likely that they are
probably not related, which takes the “I’ll help
because it’ll increase the chance that more of my
genes get passed along” element out of play.
- E—Reciprocal altruism need not occur between
related individuals.
- A
- B
- E
- D
- C
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