Animal Behaviour

In social insects, alarm pheromones do not involve territory marking. Territory marking by pheromones is observed in mammals.

A circadian rhythm is any biological process that displays an endogenous oscillation of about 24 hours. These rhythms are driven by a circadian clock, and rhythms have been widely observed in plants, animals, fungi and cyanobacteria. The term circadian comes from the Latin circa, meaning around and diem or dies, meaning day. The rhythm is linked to the light–dark cycle that is photoperiod. Circannual rhythm in an animal is an adaptive character developed by the animals in response to the frequent changes in the environment.

The primary circadian clock in mammals is located in the suprachiasmatic nucleus (or nuclei) (SCN), a pair of distinct groups of cells located in the hypothalamus. Destruction of the SCN results in the complete absence of a regular sleep–wake rhythm. The SCN receives information about illumination through the eyes. The retina of the eye contains photoreceptors (rods and cones), which are used for conventional vision. But the retina also contains specialised ganglion cells which are directly photosensitive, and project directly to the SCN where they help in the entrainment of this master circadian clock.

The group of deer mouse that were exposed to natural habitat learnt to live in a natural environment with environmental stresses like competition, predation etc. Though there was no predatory owl in the natural habitat, still the acquired the way to escape from others. This escaping behavior helped them to survive the attack of the owl and those in cages could not learn the techniques to escape. So they could not survive

Kin selection is the evolutionary strategy that favours the reproductive success of an organism's relatives, even at a cost to the organism's own survival and reproduction. Kin altruism is altruistic behaviour whose evolution is driven by kin selection. Kin selection is an instance ofinclusive fitness, which combines the number of offspring produced with the number an individual can produce by supporting others, such as siblings.

Blue stick is the 1st stimulus, and then odor of cat is the 2nd stimulus, but then only blue stick generated fear in rat. In this experiment, 5 seconds after the introduction of blue stick,  the odor of cat was sprayed at one corner of the cage. Subsequently, the rat learns to associate stimulus 1 (blue stick) with stimulus 2 (cat body odor). It responds as soon as the blue stick appears and before the odor of the cat is sprayed.

According to Hamilton's rule : The relatedness of an offspring to its parents is 0.5. So, with its cousins the relatedness will be (0.5×0.5) = 0.25. Instead of giving birth to its own offspring with relatedness of 0.5 helping other siblings to reproduce will increase the relatedness to 0.5× that number of offsprings.

A circadian rhythm is any biological process that displays an endogenous, entrainable oscillation of about 24 hours. These rhythms are driven by a circadian clock, and rhythms have been widely observed in plants, animals, fungi and cyanobacteria. The term circadian comes from the Latin circa, meaning around (or approximately), and diem or dies, meaning day. The formal study of biological temporal rhythms, such as daily, tidal, weekly, seasonal, and annual rhythms, is called chronobiology. Although circadian rhythms are endogenous they are adjusted (entrained) to the local environment by external cues called zeitgebers, commonly the most important of which is daylight.

Crypsis means blending with the background. The stripes of a tiger are a method to befool the prey. The stripes of a tiger completely mix the animal with its background in the forest or grassland. So, it is an example of cryptic coloration.

The inclusive fitness of an organism is judged by the number of offspring it has, how they support them, and how their offspring could support others. The concept serves to explain how natural selection can perpetuate altruism. If there is an 'altruism gene (or complex of genes) that influences an organism's behavior to be helpful and protective of relatives and their offspring, this behavior also increases the proportion of the altruism gene in the population, because relatives are likely to share genes with the altruist due to common descent.

Waggle dance is a term used in beekeeping and ethology for a particular figure-eight dance of the honey bee. By performing this dance, successful foragers can share, with other members of the colony, information about the direction and distance to patches of flowers yielding nectar and pollen, to water sources, or to new housing locations. A waggle dance with a very short waggle run used to be characterized as a distinct (round) recruitment dance. A waggle dance consists of one to 100 or more circuits, each of which consists of two phases: the waggle phase and the return phase. A worker bee's waggle dance involves running through a small figure-eight pattern: a waggle run (aka waggle phase) followed by a turn to the right to circle back to the starting point (aka return phase), another waggle run, followed by a turn and circle to the left, and so on in a regular alternation between right and left turns after waggle runs.

Karl Von Frisch’s work centered on investigations of the sensory perceptions of the honey bee and he was one of the first to translate the meaning of the waggle dance. He demonstrated bee dance in 1967. His theory was disputed by other scientists and greeted with skepticism at the time. Only recently was it definitively proved to be an accurate theoretical analysis.

Insight, in learning theory, means immediate and clear learning or understanding that takes place without overt trial-and-error testing. Insight occurs when an organism recognises relationships (or make novel associations between objects or actions) that can help it solve new problems. Here the chimpanzee, after jumping for some time, finds the relation between the boxes and the way to reach the bananas.

In evolutionary biology, reciprocal altruism is a behaviour whereby an organism acts in a manner that temporarily reduces its fitness while increasing another organism's fitness, with the expectation that the other organism will act in a similar manner at a later time. The concept was initially developed by Robert Trivers to explain the evolution of cooperation as instances of mutually altruistic acts. For reciprocity , the pairs must persist for a long time,  the benefit to the receiver must exceed the cost to the donor,  donors must recognize cheaters and not feed them.

Vampire bats (Desmodus rotandus) are example of mammals that show altruistic behavior. They share food (in this case blood) with other bats without any benefits for themselves.

Jordan's rule named after the father of American ichthyology David Starr Jordan describes the inverse relationship between water temperature and meristic characteristics. The most common found relationship is for fin ray, vertebrae, or scale numbers to increase with decreasing temperature. Bergmann's rule is an ecogeographic principle that states that within a broadly distributed taxonomic clade, populations and species of larger size are found in colder environments, and species of smaller size are found in warmer regions. Gloger's Rule is a zoological rule which states that within a species of endotherms, more heavily pigmented forms tend to be found in more humid environments, e.g., near the equator. It was named after the zoologist Constantin Wilhelm Lambert Gloger, who first remarked upon this phenomenon in 1833 in a review of covariation of climate and avian plumage colorAllen's rule is a biological rule posited by Joel Asaph Allen in 1877. It states that endotherms from colder climates usually have shorter limbs (or appendages) than the equivalent animals from warmer climates.

Nikolaas Niko Tinbergen was a Dutch ethologist and ornithologist who shared the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Karl von Frisch and Konrad Lorenz for their discoveries concerning organization and elicitation of individual and social behavior patterns in animals. He described fixed action pattern in animals. In ethology, a fixed action pattern (FAP), or modal action pattern, is an instinctive behavioral sequence that is indivisible and runs to completion. Fixed action patterns are invariant and are produced by a neural network known as the innate releasing mechanism in response to an external sensory stimulus known as a sign stimulus or releaser (a signal from one individual to another). A fixed action pattern is one of the few types of behaviors which can be said to be hard-wired and instinctive.Ian Pavlov has contributed to many areas of physiology and neurological sciences. Most of his work involved research in, conditioning and involuntary reflex actions. He had come to learn this concept of conditioned reflex when examining the rates of salivations among dogs. Pavlov had learned then when a bell was rung in subsequent time with food being presented to the dog in consecutive sequences, the dog will initially salivate when the food is presented. The dog will later come to associate the ringing of the bell with the presentation of the food and salivate upon the ringing of the bell.Konrad Zacharias Lorenz was an Austrian zoologist, ethologist, and ornithologist. Lorenz studied instinctive behavior in animals, especially in greylag geese and jackdaws. Working with geese, he rediscovered the principle of imprinting (originally described by Douglas Spalding in the 19th century) in the behavior of nidifugous birds. Thorpe’s exposition of latent learning and insight learning is particularly relevant. Latent learning is a type of learning which does not express immediately in an overt response; it occurs without any obvious reinforcement of the behavior or associations that are learned. Interest in latent learning arose largely because the phenomenon seemed to conflict with the widely-held view that reinforcement was necessary for learning to occur.

Lunar rhythms in biological systems are phenomena whose timing corresponds to a lunar month, the Moon's (roughly) 29.5 day orbit around Earth. In some cases these rhythms may depend on external cues, such as a greater or smaller amount of moonlight due to the moon's phases. In other cases, for example, the approximately-monthly cycle of menstruation, the correlation in timing may reflect no known lunar influenceA circadian rhythm is any biological process that displays an endogenous, entrainable oscillation of about 24 hours. These rhythms are driven by a circadian clock, and rhythms have been widely observed in plants, animals, fungi and cyanobacteria. The term circadian comes from the Latin circa, meaning around (or approximately), and diem or dies, meaning day.Tidal rhythm commonly observed in marine life, which follow the roughly 12.4-hour transition from high to low tide and back.Annual rhythm is the repetitions of functions every year. For example, reproduction in animals.

Here the non toxic palatable reddish colored species is the target of the predator. So, in order to escape from the predator bird it will mimic the toxic non palatable orange species. Thus natural selection has selected the mimicry of orange colored species by the reddish one.

The chimpanzee will stack the boxes together to climb them and reach the bananas. It will at first try to reach the bananas by jumping, but since the ceiling is at a great height, it will not be able to reach there. So, it will stack the boxes to climb them and reach the bananas.