Download Study Guide for Exam - Ecology | ECOL 3500 and more Study notes Ecology and Environment in PDF only on Docsity! Ecology Test 3 Ch9 Territoriality is an area defended by an individual against intruders. Organisms will maintain territories to: o Control amount of extra-pair copulations. o The resource is defensible. o The reward of defending outweighs the cost of not being able to travel. o Parental care, if important, is not sacrificed by defending. Goldfinch example: number of head turns in a flock correlated with less time looking for predators as an individual, which meant more time looking and eating food. However, too many finches in the flock decreased the amount of food an individual in the flock would receive. Ritualized antagonistic behavior: Harris’ Sparrows dark throats convey dominance and aggression and when experimentally changed, the dominant must constantly attack to remain dominant and the subdominants are constantly attacked. Altruistic behavior common in eusociality. For instance, wasps have special relatedness due to haplodiploidy. This way, males are related to their grandfather and grandson by 1. Females are related to their mother by 0.5 and sisters by 0.75. Worker wasps choose whether an egg is a queen or a worker. Eusociality o Several adults live together to increase fitness. o There are overlapping generations. o Nests are cooperatively built. o Sterile cast dominance exists where one or a few individuals have reproductive dominance. Ch10 Populations go extinct, not individuals. Metapopulation theory is the behavior of a population when the habitat is divided into fragments. Yellow warbler feeding a cowbird chick (a parasitic bird) because cowbirds like open land and only travel a certain distance into a forest to look for nests. Habitat fragmentation caused areas of forest normally not touched by cowbirds to be exposed for colonization. Common garden experiment states that populations do not expand infinitely because they have a specific range of temperature, altitudes, etc. that limit their outward growth. Ecological niche modeling uses geographic space and ecological space to predict species distribution in an area. Population structure refers to: o Density and spacing of individuals within suitable habitat. o The Demographic proportions.
