A chorus of frogs fills the air on a spring evening. The frog cal...

Question

A chorus of frogs fills the air on a spring evening. The frog calls are courtship signals. What are the functions of courtship behaviors? How might a behavioral ecologist explain the proximate cause of this behavior? The ultimate cause?

Accepted Answer

Hi everyone. Welcome back. Let's look at our next problem. It says identify the incorrect statement about mating behavior. Well, let's recall that when we talk about mating behavior, we're not just talking about behavior surrounding the mating act itself, but also the behaviors involved in attracting mates, competing for mates and caring for offspring with that in mind. Let's also remember that we're looking for the incorrect statement here and that we do have uh in choice D an option of all the above statements are incorrect. So let's keeping that in mind and evaluate our answer choices here. Choice A says it includes attracting mates. Well, this is a true statement as we discussed over here. Um When we think about mating behavior, we think about things like courtship behaviors, which is something that's done to attract mates. So that is a correct statement about mating behavior and therefore not our answer choice B says it includes inter sexual competition for mates. Well, this one is a little bit tricky, but this is a false or incorrect statement and that's because of this combination of the terminology inter sexual competition. So to help keep this straight, I'm just going to put up these two definitions here. And what we're interested here is we have inter sexual selection is the term we want here. And that's when members of one sex are choosing mates of the other sex. So it's not intersexual competition, but inter sexual selection. This would be something like imagine birds that do where the males do courtship dances. The females watch the courtship dances and from that select a mate from among the males. So that's gonna be our correct answer as to the incorrect statement because of the wrong use of terminology where we see competition. Um Looking down at our definition here, intra sexual selection or intra sexual competition is when there's competition between members of the same sex for mates usually involving aggression. So imagine a herd of horses, a herd of female horses um with a stallion and two stallions will fight each other with the winner being able to mate with the females in the herd. So we have inter sexual selection, intra sexual competition. Um If it's tricky to remember which prefixes, which made me think of the interstate freeway that goes from one state to another between different states. So that can be a way to remember that inter sexual selection is involves the members of the two different sexes, whereas intra sexual competition is among members of the same sex. Now we know that choice d must be incorrect since we had our correct answer in choice A So I'm gonna go ahead and cross that off. And then finally, let's look at choice C. Which says it involves parental care and yes, caring for offspring counts as part of mating behavior. Um That's because there is a direct relationship here. Things like building nests which are used to care for the offspring. Um And whether one parent or both are involved in caring for the offspring, which is connected to mating for instance, um External fertilization is more likely to be in species that have both parents care for the offspring as opposed to internal fertilization. So caring for offspring, parental care is um, definitely part of mating behavior. So the incorrect statement about mating behavior is choice be. It includes inter sexual competition for meets. See you in the next video.

A chorus of frogs fills the air on a spring evening. The frog calls are courtship signals. What are the functions of courtship behaviors? How might a behavioral ecologist explain the proximate cause of this behavior? The ultimate cause?

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