Evolution and Ecology
This person is called the 'Father of Evolution' and developed the concept of natural selection.
Who is Charles Darwin?
The total area an animal uses regularly for foraging, mating, and other activities — not necessarily defended.
What is a home range?
This foraging theory predicts that animals maximize net energy gain per unit time while feeding.
What is optimal foraging theory?
A top-down trophic cascade is triggered by changes at this trophic level.
What is the top predator/apex predator level?
The defining characteristic of a zoonotic disease — in one sentence.
What is a disease that can be transmitted between animals and humans aka it crosses the species barrier?
A behavior in which an organism helps another animal at its own expense
What is altruism?
Chordates possess this internal structure that non chordates lack.
What is a backbone (vertebral column)?
These six levels of ecological organization, from smallest to largest, include the individual, population, community, ecosystem, biome, and this broadest level.
What is the biosphere?
A ecological behavioral model that predicts how animals choose the most efficient territory size by balancing the costs and benefits of defense
What is optimal territory theory?
Risk-sensitive optimal foraging predicts that animals in energy deficit will favor this type of foraging option.
What is a higher-variance (riskier) option (they are gambling for a large payoff)?
This species type has a disproportionately large ecological impact relative to its biomass — remove it and the ecosystem changes dramatically.
What is a keystone species?
This misfolded-protein pathogen causes Chronic Wasting Disease in deer and elk — it is neither a virus, bacterium, nor fungus.
What is a prion?
Sexual dimorphism arises from sexual selection — give one example of a secondary sexual characteristic from a Pacific Northwest species.
Your answer better be good.....
The scientific study of how animals behaves, especially in their natural environments
What is Ethology?
This term describes the ability of an organism to maintain stable internal conditions despite external environmental changes.
What is homeostasis?
This migration type occurs regardless of environmental conditions — the animal migrates every year on a fixed schedule.
What is obligate migration?
This phenomenon, in which trees produce unusually large seed crops synchronously every few years, is called a ___ year.
What is a mast year?
This kind of competition occurs between individuals of the same species
What is intraspecific competition?
The animal species (or environment) where the pathogen naturally resides and multiplies, often without causing disease in the reservoir
What is a reservoir host?
According to the Sexy Son Hypothesis, females select mates primarily to gain this benefit for their offspring.
What is heritable attractiveness/mating success? Basically looking for sons who are highly attractive to future females
This type of mimicry is where you look like a toxic model but you are actually non-toxic
What is batesian mimicry?
A rapid evolutionary process where a single ancestral species diversifies into a wide variety of new forms, each specialized to exploit different ecological niches
What is adaptive Radiation?
A mathematical model developed to predict how animals will distribute themselves among habitats with varying levels of resource availability
What is Fretwell’s Ideal Free Distribution?
The Marginal Value Theorem says a forager should leave a patch and move on when this happens to its rate of energy intake
When the rate of energy gain in the current patch falls below the average rate of payoff across the broader habitat
A remora fish riding a shark, gaining transportation and scraps without harming or benefiting the shark, is an example of this species interaction.
What is commensalism?
This bird was observed feeding in open landfills, resulting in a population boom, where it then began to interact with nearby poultry sheds; passing disease back and forth
What is the Australian White Ibis?
A fixed action pattern (FAP) is triggered by a specific stimulus called this.
What is a sign stimulus?
This type of explanation address the mechanisms that produce a particular behavior by evaluating the environmental stimuli that trigger a behavior with the genetic and physiological mechanisms that make it possible
What is a proximate explanation?
Whale pelvis bones, the human appendix, and the dewclaws of some mammals are all examples of this — structures that have lost most or all of their original function through evolution
What are vestigial structures?
Of dispersal, dispersion, and distribution — this term specifically describes the spatial pattern of individuals across a landscape at a given time.
What is dispersion?
Ruminants ferment plant material in this organ, then re-chew it as cud — unlike hindgut fermenters that process material after the stomach.
What is the rumen (foregut/rumen)?
There may be some justification for this type of species interaction not "truly" existing
What is amensalism?
Name two transmission pathways by which zoonotic diseases can spread from animals to humans.
What are any two of: direct contact, indirect contact (fomites), vector-borne, foodborne/waterborne, airborne/respiratory droplets?
Tinbergen's four questions address causation, development, function, and this fourth dimension of behavioral analysis.
What is phylogeny (evolutionary history / evolutionary origin)?
An ecological model where dominant individuals monopolize high-quality territories, forcing less competitive individuals (subordinates) into lower-quality areas, leading to unequal fitness and stable territory sizes for dominants
What is Ideal Despotic Distribution?