Bi412/512 Animal Behavior, Exam 1 Practice Page 1

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1 Bi412/512 Animal Behavior, Exam 1 Practice Page 1 1. Suppose you observe that song sparrows sing more at dawn than at other times of the day. Hmm, maybe singing early in the morning communicates to female sparrows that you are more robust than other birds and can put off foraging until later. Would you consider the last statement to be a... (a) prediction based on hypothesis. (b) conclusion from results that might have been obtained. (c) hypothesis. (d) causal question about the system. 2. What is the difference between a releaser and a releasing mechanism? (a) They are basically the same thing. (b) A releaser is a kind of stimulus and a releasing mechanism is a set of neurons in the central nervous system that control a behavior. (c) A releasing mechanism is the set of sensory neurons that detect the releaser. (d) A releaser controls learned action patterns while a releasing mechanism controls fixed action patterns. 3. Why is behavioral polyphenism so common? (a) This is due to genetic drift (b) Most of the polyphenism is due to developmental differences in terms of varying experiences. (c) There is a limited extent to which genes control behavior, and the variation seen is the part not under genetic control. (d) Even at a particular time and place there may not be just one optimal behavior, so multiple alleles controlling different behaviors persist in the population 4. What is the advantage of innate behaviors, compared with learned behaviors? (a) You can perform a critical behavior perfectly the first time. (b) There is no parental cost associated with training. (c) There is no danger that you will lose fitness by mistakes. (d) A desirable innate trait will be fixed more rapidly in the population. (e) All of the above.

2 Bi412/512 Animal Behavior, Exam 1 Practice Page 2 5. How well correlated is verbal ability of human children with the verbal ability of their adoptive parents? (a) Very highly correlated. (b) Not very well correlated. 6. Frog bug detectors are an example of... (a) an innate releasing mechanism. (b) a key stimulus. (c) an extreme sensory filter. (d) a run-away detection system with no upper bound. 7. Very roughly, about how many generations or years did it take a Garter snake population to establish a gene in a population that allows eating slugs? (a) The gene was common in the population after just two generations. (b) The gene controlling the behavior was, in fact, present always in the population but in regions without slugs it was suppressed. (c) It is estimated that approximately 100 million years were necessary for the rare gene mutation to be fully distributed in the species. (d) In only 10,000 years such a useful gene mutation was established in the coastal population. 8. The ultimate reason why the slug gene was fixed in the population is that coastal population Garter snakes possessing it could detect a new, plentiful food source. (a) True (b) False 9. Which of the following steps was not likely in the evolution of monogamy in Prairie Voles? (a) Males who kill offspring of females with whom they have not mated. (b) Males who guard their mates to make sure they don t mate with any other male. (c) Females who increase their aggressiveness to combat male infanticide (d) Males trying to control other males to keep them away from females.

3 Bi412/512 Animal Behavior, Exam 1 Practice Page Consider infanticide by male lions who take over a pride. What would happen to the level of infanticide if the tenure of a particular male lion as head of the pride was longer? (a) It would most likely increase. (b) It would most likely decrease. 11. Which of the following is not one of Tinbergen s four questions about behavior? (a) How does an animal respond to environmental cues compared with the behavior of unrelated species in the same situation? (b) How does an animal s behavior change due to experiences it gains during its growth? (c) How does a behavior lead to improved survival and reproduction? (d) How does an animal process sensory information to activate and adjust its behavior? 12. A given bee in a hive may switch from being a feeder bee to being a forager bee based on the social composition of the hive. Would you say, then, that bee behavior is not genetically programmed and that bees can learn to do different sorts of behaviors based on the needs of the colony? 13. If you allow birds of one species to raise chicks of another species, the chicks will imprint on the foster parents and ultimately try to mate with the wrong species of bird. (a) True (b) False (c) It depends on the species

4 Bi412/512 Animal Behavior, Exam 1 Practice Page Some species birds are very good at caching seeds and then finding the caches later, while other species of birds do not do this. Which of the following statements about how their brains work is most accurate? (a) With few exceptions the brains of birds in a broad taxonomic group, say all songbirds, are very similar and while there are differences in behavior these are too subtle to be identified by any gross changes in brain structure. (b) If you examine bird brains, of even closely related species in which one group is good at finding seed caches and the other species is not so good, gross changes in the brain are apparent. 15. A complex behavior such as parental care can be abolished by a single gene mutation. Does this mean that the actual behavior, i.e., all the actions of parental care are caused by a single gene product? (a) Even a complex set of action patterns can be triggered internally by a single releasing mechanism chemical, and if the mutation prevents the production of this chemical then the behavior will not happen. (b) Typically when a behavior is prevented by a single gene mutation, the defect is in the sensory ability to perceive a necessary trigger, such that the behavior is never released. 16. The fact that you can breed animals in such a way that their behavior changes, for example, to reduce aggression suggests... (a) that there was a good deal of natural variation in the population relative to the genes that cause the behavior and you have selectively changed the allele ratio due to your breeding. (b) that the set of genes controlling the behavior mutate rapidly and you have been able to select the individuals with the new genes at each generation. 17. What are developmental switch mechanisms? (a) These are mechanisms in which parents alternate care of offspring. (b) Relative to animal behavior the switch mechanism allows a hierarchy of development, such that particular adaptive behaviors occur first, and then when the animal is older a different behavioral phenotype takes over. (c) Switch mechanisms allow different behaviors to be swapped out in different conditions, for example when birds decide to migrate to a closer or more distant over-wintering ground. (d) A switch mechanism is one in which different behavioral phenotypes can be produced depending on environmental conditions leading to a bimodal (usually) distribution of polyphenism in a single population.

5 Bi412/512 Animal Behavior, Exam 1 Practice Page Innate behaviors have the advantage, when compared with learned behaviors, of always having a lower coefficient of variation and thus providing a more precise and reliable response to environmental stimuli. (a) True (b) False 19. If female lizards with red throats produce more eggs than females with orange throats, then we can conclude that the red throat is an evolved adaptation. Is this true or false? (a) True, because there is variation in this species, a critical requirement for the evolution of adaptations by natural selection. (b) False, because females with orange throats could still have more offspring that live to reproduce than red throat females. (c) False, because there is no guarantee that red throat females are the best for the long term preservation of this species. (d) You can t tell because you don t know if there are more red throat females in the population compared with orange throat females. Young white-crowned sparrows are remarkably good at remembering the sounds produced by adult white-crowned males singing around them. If the learning abilities of this bird evolved by natural selection, which of the following conditions must have applied to the species in the past? 20. There must have been variation in the memory skills of individuals. 21. The sparrow species must have been threatened by extinction at some point. 22. Individuals that were better than average at remembering must have been able to pass on their abilities to their offspring.

6 Bi412/512 Animal Behavior, Exam 1 Practice Page Birds that were better than average at remembering songs must have had more surviving offspring on average than the typical sparrow at that time. 24. Any changes that took place in the past must have promoted greater population stability in this bird. 25. Why do male Stickleback fish preferentially court larger females? (a) The larger females are better able to guard the eggs against predators. (b) Larger females can forage farther for food to help feed the offspring, which is important because in this species both parents take care of the young. (c) Experiments on females show that the larger ones contain more eggs, and the male is interested in fertilizing as many eggs at one time as he can. (d) Larger females are more fit, and size alone is a releaser for the male courtship behavior. 26. Which of the following would not be an item of an ethogram? (a) Bears were observed sleeping between 1400 and 1600 Hrs. (b) Sniffing with nose elevated. (c) Copulation events. (d) Animals are out of view. (e) Feeding. 27. Suppose you observe ground pecking in a group of birds. There are six distinguishable individuals, and you observe each one every five minutes for an hour. Each time you score whether the individual is pecking or not. What sort of methodology are you using? (a) ad libitum sampling (b) all occurrences continuous sampling (c) scan sampling (d) redundant point processing

7 Bi412/512 Animal Behavior, Exam 1 Practice Page Given the methodology used in the previous question, would you be more likely to record the animal s states or events? (a) states (b) events 29. When would you use non-parametric statistics in place of parametric statistics? (a) Non-parametric statistics are more accurate, but harder to calculate. (b) If you are sure that your sample population comes from a larger population that is normally distributed. (c) Non-parametric statistics are used when there are more than two groups compared, otherwise parametric statistics are employed. (d) Although parametric statistics are more exact, if you don t know the nature of the distribution underlying your sample then you must use the non-parametric equivalents. (e) none of the above