Chapter 41 – Animal Behavior – Terms
Adaptive Behavior: a behavior that makes an organism better able to survive and reproduce.
Also, the evolutionary process that leads to the development or persistence of such a trait.
Altruistic Behavior: behavior that benefits other individuals at a cost to the individual that
performs it.
Behavioral Biology: a classical study of animal behavior that focuses on conditioning natural
reflexes so that they can be modified by experience to respond to an unnatural stimulus.
Circadian Rhythms: a rhythm of growth or activity that recurs about every 24 hours.
Classical Conditioning: learning to associate one stimulus with another, unrelated stimulus.
Cooperative Behavior: the interaction of two or more organisms directed toward a common
goal, which is mutually beneficial.
Cost-benefit Analysis: an approach to evolutionary studies that assumes an animal has a limited
amount of time and energy to devote to each of its activities, and that each activity has fitness
costs as well as benefits.
Crepuscular: appearing or active in twilight.
Culture: the collection of knowledge, tools, values, and rules that characterize a human/animal
society.
Direct Fitness: related to the number of offspring an organism produces.
Distal: away from the point of attachment or other reference point.
Diurnal: only active during the day.
Ethology: an approach to the study of animal behavior that focuses on studying many species
on natural environments and addresses questions about the evolution of behavior.
Fixed Action Patterns: in ethology, a genetically determined behavior that is performed without
learning, stereotypic (performed the same way each time), and not modifiable by learning.
Habituation: the process of learning to ignore stimuli that are unimportant, irrelevant, or
repetitive.
Hamilton’s Rule: the principle that, for an apparent altruistic behavior to be adaptive, the
fitness benefit of that act to the recipient times the degree of relatedness of the performer and
the recipient must be greater than the cost to the performer.
Imprinting: in animal behavior, a rapid form of learning in which an animal learns, during a brief
critical period, to make a particular response, which is maintained for life, to some object or
other organism.
Inclusive Fitness: the sum of an individual’s genetic contribution to subsequent generations
both via production of its own offspring and via its influence on the survival of relatives who are
not direct descendants.
Innate Behavior: a genetically programmed behavior. They are always heritable, intrinsic,
stereotypic, inflexible, and consummate. (see instinctual behavior)
Insight Learning: a type of learning that uses reason, especially to form conclusions, inferences,
or judgments to solve a problem; opposite of trial and error.
Instinctual Behavior: an inborn behavior that is resistant to modification by learning and is
triggered by simple stimuli (releasers) such as color, smell, or sound; what an organism has
from day one.
Kin Selection: that component of inclusive fitness resulting from helping the survival of relatives
containing the same alleles by descent from a common ancestor.
Nocturnal: only active during the night.
Operant Behavior: an organism’s response to consequences.
Proximate Cause: the immediate genetic, physiological, neurological, and developmental
mechanisms responsible for a behavior or morphology.
Releaser: sensory stimulus that triggers performance of a stereotyped behavior pattern.
Sexual Selection: selection by one sex of characteristics in individuals of the opposite sex. Also,
the favoring of characteristics in one sex as a result of competition among individuals of that
sex for mates.
Suprachiasmatic Nuclei (SCN): in mammals, two clusters of neurons just above the optic chiasm
that act as the master circadian clock.
Ultimate Cause: in ethology, the evolutionary processes that produced an animal’s capacity and
tendency to behave in particular ways.