Biology 2483A Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Quantitative Trait Locus, Optimal Foraging Theory, Backcrossing
Document Summary
An animal"s behavioral decisions play a critical role in activities such as obtaining food, finding mates, avoiding predators. These decisions have costs and benefits that affect an individual"s ability to survive and reproduce. Behavioral ecology is the study of the ecological and evolutionary basis of animal behavior. Wood frog"s success is due to migratory populations: an evolutionary approach to the study of behavior leads to testable predictions. Proximate causes (immediate) or how the behavior occurs. Ultimate causes why the behavior occurs; the evolutionary and historical reasons. If the traits that confer advantage are heritable, natural selection can result in adaptive evolution: traits that confer survival or reproductive advantages tend to increase in frequency over time. Many studies have documented adaptive behavioral change. Silverman and bieman (1993) showed that cockroaches exposed to traps with a bait containing an insecticide plus glucose evolved glucose aversion, which is controlled by a single gene: cockroaches had an adaptive behavioral response.