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Lab 13 Animal Behavior Quiz
1. (1 pt) What is a pheromone?
A pheromone is a chemical that is excreted by one organism that is responded to
by other members of that organism’s species
2. (1 pt) What is a behavior?
A behavior is an action carried out in response to a stimulus.
3. (1pt) List the 3 steps used in any signaling system.
• transmission
• reception
• response
4. (2 pt) Describe two ways that living in a group can reduce your risk of being eaten
by a predator.
Two things that reduce the risk of predation living in a group are the confusion
effect and the dilution effect. The confusion effect works by making it harder to
focus on catching one individual in a group making catching a prey more difficult
for the predator. The dilution effect works by reducing the chance that an individual
is eaten given that one prey in the group will be caught. Thus if a group of one
is attacked there is a 100 percent chance that the one organism in that group is
attacked. However in a group of 10 if a predator attacks an individual in that
group, each individual only has a 10 percent chance of being attacked.
5. (1 pt) It is noon in Pullman and the sun is directly to the south. You observe a
honey bee doing a waggle dance directly to the right (90 degrees from up). What direction is the bee telling the other members of the hive to go to find the food source?
The bee is signaling that the food source is to the west of the hive.
6. (4 pts) You perform the following experiment with termite workers. You draw two
strait lines on a piece of paper 15cm apart. One line was drawn with a blue colored
pencil. The other line was drawn with a blue ink pen. You place 5 termite workers
at the start of each line and record wether they followed the line. Write an null
hypothesis and an alternative hypothesis for this experiment.
• Null Hypothesis:
There will be no difference between the two lines in how well the termites will
follow the two lines.
• Alternative Hypothesis:
The termites will follow the line drawn with the ink pen more often than they
will follow the line drawn with the colored pencil.