Animal Behavior Study Guide Study Questions PDF

Animal Behavior Study Guide (Oct 4) Here is a list of concepts and some questions from the first unit of animal behavior. This is not intended to be a comprehensive list of everything you might need to know, but it's my attempt to help you note and review important concepts as you go through your c...

Animal Behavior Study Guide (Oct 4) Here is a list of concepts and some questions from the first unit of animal behavior. This is not intended to be a comprehensive list of everything you might need to know, but it's my attempt to help you note and review important concepts as you go through your class notes.. For each of these, it might help to think about how they relate to animal behavior and how they relate to each other. Behaviorism Reinforcement/Conditioning Ethology Proximate vs. ultimate hypothesis Anthropomorphism Observational vs. experimental studies Objective vs. subjective observations Ethogram Scan sampling Focal animal sampling Interval vs. continuous sampling Evolution Natural Selection Mutation Genetic Drift Gene Flow Evolutionary Trade-off Adaptation Fitness Epistasis Pleiotropy Phenotypic plasticity Heritability Artificial Selection experiment Genomewide association study (GWAS) Twin Study Umwelt Input matching Stimulus filtering Clever Hans Effect cognition **Some additional things to know/think about:** What controls the rate of evolution? Why do bacteria evolve faster than elephants? What are the limits to natural selection? That is, if natural selection is working all the time, why aren't all species perfectly adapted? What are evolutionary trade-offs and changing environments and why are these the principle limits to selection? Why does it not really make sense to talk about nature vs. nurture the way people traditionally talk about it? What is the difference between an experimental study and an observational study? What are the pros and cons of each approach? Why are experimental studies generally considered to be superior in human medicine but not necessarily in animal behavior? What were the problems with behaviorism as a school of scientific research (i.e. why would very few people today consider themselves to be "behaviorists")? Viewed from the perspective of evolutionary biology today, what were a few things that Darwin was right about? What were a couple of things that Darwin was wrong about, or just didn't know? Why is it typically incorrect to talk about some gene as being "for" a particular behavior? What is required for natural selection to occur? What data would you need to collect to show that natural selection is occurring in any specific situation? What was Darwin's answer to the question of how sterile ant castes might be maintained, given that sterility should be a strategy with fitness close to zero? What does phenotypic plasticity have to do with this question? In the context of animal cognition, what is a Clever Hans Effect? How do Clever Hans effects influence the way people do animal cognition research? In the context of sensory systems, what is input matching? What about stimulus filtering? How are these illustrated by the visual system of a toad? By the echolocation system of bats? How can you test to see whether animals use a particular sense to accomplish a particular task? (think about use of polarized light by bees for foraging or use of echolocation by bats to avoid objects and catch bugs) How can you estimate heritability? Be sure to know what methods might be practical for human traits vs. what methods might be ideal for laboratory animals. What are the factors that cause evolution to occur? What conditions are necessary for these factors to be meaningful agents of evolutionary change? Be able to identify and propose proximate vs. ultimate hypotheses and to understand the relationship between them. What is fitness? How is fitness actually measured in real populations (e.g. what are some surrogates for fitness)? Why are behavioral traits usually not inherited as simple Mendelian traits (e.g. pea size or color)? What are some different kinds of sensory neurons? Which kinds do humans have/ not have? Think of an example of an animal sensory system that uses the same kinds of sensory neurons as a human sensory system but where these neurons are packaged differently. Also read over the questions from the Ape Genius video as well as the question sheet about adaptation and salamander morphs that we went part-way through and the questions from the Darwin reading.