49. Animal Behavior

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 __________.