Introduction/
Evolution
Evolution
The study of an organism’s relationship to the biotic and abiotic factors in its environment.
What is ecology?
The purpose of aposematic coloration.
What is a visual warning of toxin/danger?
How kin selection differs from group selection.
What is kin selection applies to related individuals and group selection applies to unrelated individuals?
Organisms that have a body temperature that matches the environmental temperature.
What are conformers?
The relationship between time spent in a patch and patch quality.
What is positive? (the higher quality the patch, the longer the animal stays there)
The levels of biological organization that we cover in this class, listed from smallest to largest.
1. Organism/individual
2. Population
3. Community
4. Ecosystem
An example of this is: In Costa Rican rainforests, brightly colored butterflies that are poisonous tend to resemble other brightly-colored and poisonous butterfly species.
What is Mullerian mimicry?
The type of selection that occurs when a mother protects her offspring.
What is individual selection?
Over a range of environmental temperatures, the body temperature of endotherms...
Remains relatively constant.
The least expensive form of movement, on a calories per gram per meter basis.
What is swimming?
Three requirements for evolution by natural selection to take place.
1) Variability
2) Heritability
3) Difference in survival & reproduction
Plant-derived chemicals that are highly toxic in even small quantities (e.g., cyanide or nicotine).
What are qualitative chemical defenses?
The type of selection that occurs when a young adult bird chooses to help its parents raise their offspring (the bird’s brothers and sisters) for a year before starting its own nest.
What is kin selection?
How ectotherms can adjust their body temperature.
What is behavioral thermoregulation?
The optimal diet from an energetic perspective.
What is maximize energy intake per unit time?
The definition of individual fitness.
What is the number of offspring an individual organism produces that reach reproductive age?
The action of stotting, where an antelope that sees a predator jumps high in the air.
Group selection requires this type of population organization.
What is a metapopulation? (a population of populations)
An advantage that ectothermy has over endothermy.
What is lower energy cost per gram?
The relationship between time spent foraging per patch and patch density on the landscape.
If a trait's Vg is equal to 0.9, that trait is...
Highly heritable.
What trees and other long-lived plants should primarily defend themselves with.
What are relatively non-toxic quantitative chemical compounds?
Haplodiploidy can help explain this behavior in bees.
What is altruistic behavior between sisters?
A thermoneutral zone is characteristic of their metabolism.
What are endotherms?
The relationship between organism size and energy expenditure on a per-gram basis.
What is negative? (as an organism gets larger, it uses less energy on a per-gram basis to heat itself)