General Biology

Pheasants do not feed their chicks. Immediately after hatching, a pheasant chick starts pecking at seeds and insects on the ground. How might a behavioral ecologist explain the ultimate cause of this behavior?

Ants carry dead ants out of an anthill and dump them on a "trash" pile. If a chemical from a dead ant is applied to a live ant, other ants will carry it, kicking and struggling, from the anthill, until the substance wears off. Which of the following explains this behavior?

Which of the following is a fixed action pattern?

Watching squirrels in the park, you start to wonder why they act so oddly. One squirrel bit the tail of another. Which of the following is a question about the proximate cause of this behavior?

Which of the following is an example of a circannual rhythm?

Which of the following well-known sayings best summarizes the idea of reciprocal altruism?

What signals might be best employed by a nocturnal forest animal seeking to identify its territory?

Imagine a population of birds in which first-year birds can either find a mate and raise an average of three offspring or stay in their parents' territory and help the parents raise two more offspring than the parents would have been able to raise without any help. Based on the theory of kin selection, we would expect that __________.

What is the main premise of sociobiology?

Pheromones are examples of __________.

Honeybees have a remarkable way of transferring information about the location of a food source to other members of the hive. The worker bees conveying this information use __________ communication to relay this information.

Graylag geese learn to follow their mothers. This is an example of __________.

How would you expect the behavior of a male fruit fly lacking the fru gene to differ from that of a normal male?

An aquaculture facility hatched salmon eggs and released young fish into a river leading to the ocean. The fish fed and grew in the ocean, and in a few years they returned to the facility. Because the number of returning fish was low, a scientist suggested adding a chemical to the river that would __________.

The enhanced reproduction, through apparently altruistic behavior, of related individuals with common alleles is referred to as __________.

Altruistic behaviors can be understood, in part, by considering the coefficient of relatedness (r) between the individuals involved. Assume that an individual mammal has the option to raise its own offspring, other genetic relatives, or a combination of offspring and other genetic relatives. From a genetic point of view, which of the following represents the least successful option?

The coefficient of relatedness between two brothers is __________.

Which of the following statements best defines an altruistic act?

Altruistic behavior __________.

Male prairie voles are monogamous. They are attentive to young and aggressive toward intruders. This appears to be related to __________.

A blackcap warbler from a captive migratory population is mated with another blackcap warbler from a captive nonmigratory population. The lab-reared offspring exhibit a modest amount of migratory restlessness. This behavior, which is intermediate between that of the two parents, could be interpreted as evidence for which of the following statements?

When Drosophila were exposed to a particular odor and electric shock at the same time, they started to avoid the odor. This is an example of __________.

One way to determine whether food preferences have a genetic basis is to __________.

In __________, an animal learns to associate one of its behaviors with reward or punishment.

What kind of learning is thought to form the origin of culture?

In cross-fostering experiments, offspring of two species are switched early in development and reared by the opposite species. They are then compared with similar offspring reared by their own species. What is the point of this experimental design?

Animal behavior is governed by complex interactions between __________.

Which of the following best illustrates optimal foraging?

Off in the distance, on the side of a mountain, you spot four female deer and a single male deer. If this reflects the mating system of this species, it would be an example of what type of mating system?

In some species, it is difficult to distinguish the sexes based on external characteristics. Which type of mating behavior is likely to occur in such species?

Which of the following questions could best be answered by applying game theory?

When animals engage in __________, they often perform displays that make them look as large and dangerous as possible.

The tendency of individuals to choose mates who are like themselves is called                   . a. natural selection; b. sexual selection; c. assortative mating; d. the founder effect; e. random mating

According to Hamilton’s rule, a. natural selection does not favor altruistic behavior that causes the death of the altruist. b. natural selection favors altruistic acts when the resulting benefit to the recipient, corrected for relatedness, exceeds the cost to the altruist. c. natural selection is more likely to favor altruistic behavior that benefits an offspring than altruistic behavior that benefits a sibling. d. the effects of kin selection are larger than the effects of direct natural selection on individuals.

Female spotted sandpipers aggressively court males and, after mating, leave the clutch of young for the male to incubate. This sequence may be repeated several times with different males until no available males remain, forcing the female to incubate her last clutch. Which of the following terms best describes this behavior? a. polygyny b. polyandry c. promiscuity d. certainty of paternity

Although many chimpanzees live in environments with oil palm nuts, members of only a few populations use stones to crack open the nuts. The likely explanation is that a. the behavioral difference is caused by genetic differences between populations. b. members of different populations have different nutritional requirements. c. the cultural tradition of using stones to crack nuts has arisen in only some populations. d. members of different populations differ in learning ability.

A region of the canary forebrain shrinks during the nonbreeding season and enlarges when breeding season begins. This change is probably associated with the annual a. addition of new syllables to a canary’s song repertoire. b. crystallization of subsong into adult songs. c. sensitive period in which canary parents imprint on new offspring. d. elimination of the memorized template for songs sung the previous year.

Which of the following is not required for a behavioral trait to evolve by natural selection? a. In each individual, the form of the behavior is determined entirely by genes. b. The behavior varies among individuals. c. An individual’s reproductive success depends in part on how the behavior is performed. d. Some component of the behavior is genetically inherited.

Which of the following is true of innate behaviors? a. Their expression is only weakly influenced by genes. b. They occur with or without environmental stimuli. c. They are expressed in most individuals in a population. d. They occur in invertebrates and some vertebrates but not mammals.