Conclusions – Session 8 | Animal Behavior Short Course

We started off with covering some broad principles and history to try to help make sense of the mass of details that come in things like the Halliday textbook. Some of the concluding material will take us out of the typical and into the exceptional. Because, like I’ve said in class from time to time, it is hard to be able to say either “always” or “never” when it comes to describing the biology of organisms. (There’s even a pseudo-law to state that, the “Harvard Law”, which holds that “under the most tightly controlled circumstances of temperature, pressure, diet, diurnal cycle, and phase of the moon, the organism will do as it damn well pleases.”)

Green Heron and Feeding

Video

This green heron has somehow worked out the use of bait to get a fish in range. It doesn’t exactly fit a category like “tool use” that we have talked about before. It is, so far as I know, an atypical behavior for a green heron. But we can speculate on how this individual came to do it, and what it would take for this to become part of the green heron ethogram for the species.

Parasite-Mediated Control of Host Behavior

Ed Yong TED talk on Suicidal wasps, zombie roaches and other parasite tales

A few examples of parasites that manipulate host behavior.

Crodyceps fungi and ants

Rabid raccoon

Another rabid raccoon

Concept: Ecological niche

Various definitions exist, but Hutchinson’s from 1957 is widely used. A niche is an n-dimensional hypervolume of resources that an organism can exploit. That’s actually the fundamental niche and describes what circumstances an organism could use. The description of what an organism most commonly uses is a realized niche. What are the dimensions? These are simply each some sort of resource or condition and the values that the organism uses. So, for instance, “temperature” is a condition, and each species will have a range of temperatures that it can live within.

Discussion of niche