A herbivore is an animal anatomically and physiologically adapted to eating plant material, for example foliage or marine algae, for the main component of its diet. As a result of their plant diet, herbivorous animals typically have mouthparts adapted to rasping or grinding. Horses and other herbivores have wide flat teeth that are adapted to grinding grass, tree bark, and other tough plant material.
Behavioral ecology, also spelled behavioural ecology, is the study of the evolutionary basis for animal behavior due to ecological pressures. Behavioral ecology emerged from ethology after Niko Tinbergen outlined four questions to address when studying animal behaviors: What are the proximate causes, ontogeny, survival value, and phylogeny of a behavior?
Foraging is searching for wild food resources. It affects an animal's fitness because it plays an important role in an animal's ability to survive and reproduce. Foraging theory is a branch of behavioral ecology that studies the foraging behavior of animals in response to the environment where the animal lives.
A herd is a social group of certain animals of the same species, either wild or domestic. The form of collective animal behavior associated with this is referred to as herding.
Dominance hierarchy is a type of social hierarchy that arises when members of a social group interact, to create a ranking system. In social living groups, members are likely to compete for access to limited resources and mating opportunities. Rather than fighting each time they meet, relative rank is established between members of the same sex. Based on repetitive interactions a social order is created that is subject to change each time a dominant animal is challenged by a subordinate one.
Reproductive success is defined as an individual's production of offspring per breeding event or lifetime. This is not limited by the number of offspring produced by one individual, but also the reproductive success of these offspring themselves. Reproductive success is different from fitness in that individual success is not necessarily a determinant for adaptive strength of a genotype since the effects of chance and the environment have no influence on those specific genes. Reproductive success turns into a part of fitness when the offspring are actually recruited into the breeding population. If offspring quantity is not correlated with quality this holds up, but if not then reproductive success must be adjusted by traits that predict juvenile survival in order to be measured effectively. Quality and quantity is about finding the right balance between reproduction and maintenance and the disposable soma theory of aging tells us that a longer lifespan will come at the cost of reproduction and thus longevity is not always correlated with high fecundity. Parental investment is a key factor in reproductive success since taking better care to offspring is what often will give them a fitness advantage later in life. This includes mate choice and sexual selection as an important factor in reproductive success, which is another reason why reproductive success is different from fitness as individual choices and outcomes are more important than genetic differences. As reproductive success is measured over generations, Longitudinal studies are the preferred study type as they follow a population or an individual over a longer period of time in order to monitor the progression of the individual(s). These long term studies are preferable since they negate the effects of the variation in a single year or breeding season.
Optimal foraging theory (OFT) is a behavioral ecology model that helps predict how an animal behaves when searching for food. Although obtaining food provides the animal with energy, searching for and capturing the food require both energy and time. To maximize fitness, an animal adopts a foraging strategy that provides the most benefit (energy) for the lowest cost, maximizing the net energy gained. OFT helps predict the best strategy that an animal can use to achieve this goal.
In ecology, an ideal free distribution (IFD) is a theoretical way in which a population's individuals distribute themselves among several patches of resources within their environment, in order to minimize resource competition and maximize fitness. The theory states that the number of individual animals that will aggregate in various patches is proportional to the amount of resources available in each. For example, if patch A contains twice as many resources as patch B, there will be twice as many individuals foraging in patch A as in patch B.
Sexual conflict or sexual antagonism occurs when the two sexes have conflicting optimal fitness strategies concerning reproduction, particularly over the mode and frequency of mating, potentially leading to an evolutionary arms race between males and females. In one example, males may benefit from multiple matings, while multiple matings may harm or endanger females, due to the anatomical differences of that species.
Metellina segmentata is a spider in the family Tetragnathidae with a Palaearctic distribution. It has also been introduced to Canada.
Sexual cannibalism is when a female cannibalizes her mate prior to, or after copulation. It is a trait observed in many arachnid orders and several insect orders. Several hypotheses to explain this seemingly paradoxical behavior have been proposed. The adaptive foraging hypothesis, aggressive spillover hypothesis and mistaken identity hypothesis are among the proposed hypotheses to explain how sexual cannibalism evolved. This behavior is believed to have evolved as a manifestation of sexual conflict, occurring when the reproductive interests of males and females differ. In many species that exhibit sexual cannibalism, the female consumes the male upon detection. Females of cannibalistic species are generally hostile and unwilling to mate; thus many males of these species have developed adaptive behaviors to counteract female aggression.
Scathophaga stercoraria, commonly known as the yellow dung fly or the golden dung fly, is one of the most familiar and abundant flies in many parts of the Northern Hemisphere. As its common name suggests, it is often found on the feces of large mammals, such as horses, cattle, sheep, deer, and wild boar, where it goes to breed. The distribution of S. stercoraria is likely influenced by human agriculture, especially in northern Europe and North America. The Scathophaga are integral in the animal kingdom due to their role in the natural decomposition of dung in fields. They are also very important in the scientific world due to their short life cycles and susceptibility to experimental manipulations; thus, they have contributed significant knowledge about animal behavior.
Bateman's principle, in evolutionary biology, is that in most species, variability in reproductive success is greater in males than in females. It was first proposed by Angus John Bateman (1919–1996), an English geneticist. Bateman suggested that, since males are capable of producing millions of sperm cells with little effort, while females invest much higher levels of energy in order to nurture a relatively small number of eggs, the female plays a significantly larger role in their offspring's reproductive success. Bateman’s paradigm thus views females as the limiting factor of parental investment, over which males will compete in order to copulate successfully.
Anthidium manicatum, commonly called the European wool carder bee is a species of bee in the family Megachilidae, the leaf-cutter bees or mason bees.
Anthidium maculosum is a species of bee in the family Megachilidae, the leaf-cutter, carder, or mason bees. It is a solitary bee where the males are territorial and the females take part in polyandry. The males of A. maculosum differ from most other males of bee species because the males are significantly larger than females. In addition, subordinate males that act as satellites are smaller than territory-owning males. This species can be found predominately in Mexico and the United States.
A nuptial gift is a nutritional gift given by one partner in some animals' sexual reproduction practices.
In biology, optimality models are a tool used to evaluate the costs and benefits of different organismal features, traits, and characteristics, including behavior, in the natural world. This evaluation allows researchers to make predictions about an organisms's optimal behavior or other aspects of its phenotype. Optimality modeling is the modeling aspect of optimization theory. It allows for the calculation and visualization of the costs and benefits that influence the outcome of a decision, and contributes to an understanding of adaptations. The approach based on optimality models in biology is sometimes called optimality theory.
Sexual selection in birds concerns how birds have evolved a variety of mating behaviors, with the peacock tail being perhaps the most famous example of sexual selection and the Fisherian runaway. Commonly occurring sexual dimorphisms such as size and color differences are energetically costly attributes that signal competitive breeding situations. Many types of avian sexual selection have been identified; intersexual selection, also known as female choice; and intrasexual competition, where individuals of the more abundant sex compete with each other for the privilege to mate. Sexually selected traits often evolve to become more pronounced in competitive breeding situations until the trait begins to limit the individual's fitness. Conflicts between an individual fitness and signaling adaptations ensure that sexually selected ornaments such as plumage coloration and courtship behavior are “honest” traits. Signals must be costly to ensure that only good-quality individuals can present these exaggerated sexual ornaments and behaviors.
In behavioral ecology, polyandry is a class of mating system where one female mates with several males in a breeding season. Polyandry is often compared to the polygyny system based on the cost and benefits incurred by members of each sex. Polygyny is where one male mates with several females in a breeding season . A common example of polyandrous mating can be found in the field cricket of the invertebrate order Orthoptera. Polyandrous behavior is also prominent in many other insect species, including the red flour beetle and the species of spider Stegodyphus lineatus. Polyandry also occurs in some primates such as marmosets, mammal groups, the marsupial genus' Antechinus and bandicoots, around 1% of all bird species, such as jacanas and dunnocks, insects such as honeybees, and fish such as pipefish.
In life history theory, the cost of reproduction hypothesis is the idea that reproduction is costly in terms of future survival and reproduction. This is mediated by various mechanisms, with the two most prominent being hormonal regulation and differential allocation of internal resources.
