Animal Behavior - Chpt. 4 Reading Notes

Front 1

What do herring gull chicks pay, at least very young ones, pay attention to when feeding?

Back 1

Ignore almost everything except the shape of the bill and its red dot.

Front 2

If the goose egg is replaced with almost any roughly egg-shaped object, (or if the egg was removed), what will it do?

Back 2

Invariably run through its egg retrieval routine

Front 3

What is ethology?

Back 3

The discipline dedicated to the study of both the proximate and ultimate causes of animal behavior; especially interested in the instincts exhibited by wild animals living under natural conditions

Front 4

What is an instinct?

Back 4

Can be defined as a behavior pattern that appears in fully functional form the first time it is performed, even though the animal may have had no previous experience with the cues.

Front 5

What is the neural network responsible for detecting the simple cue and activating the instinct called?

Back 5

Sign stimulus releaser

Front 6

What is the sign stimulus or releaser?

Back 6

Simple cue for an innate releasing mechanism

Front 7

What is the fixed action pattern?

Back 7

The instinct activated in the innate releasing mechanism

Front 8

How does the butterfly-hunting wasp overcome the threat of ants that attack intruders?

Back 8

Secrete a cocktail of the same chemicals used by the ants, which first attracts ants to the wasp, but then repels them, sending them scurrying off to assault their colonymates instead of the wasp

Front 9

Describe the tympanic membrane or tympanum in moths.

Back 9

Lies over a chamber on the side of the mother's thorax; attached to two neurons, the A1 and A2 auditory receptors; these work by responding to the energy contained in selected stimuli by changing the permeability of their cell membranes to positively charged ions; As positively-charged ions flow in, they change the electrical charge inside the cell relative to the charge on the other side of the membrane. If the inward movement of ions is sufficiently great, a substantial, abrupt, local change in the electrical charge difference across the membrane may occur and spread to neighboring portions of the membrane, sweeping around the cell body and down the axon.

Front 10

How do the A1 and A2 receptors work?

Back 10

Work by responding to the energy contained in selected stimuli by changing the permeability of their cell membranes to positively charged ions; As positively-charged ions flow in, they change the electrical charge inside the cell relative to the charge on the other side of the membrane. If the inward movement of ions is sufficiently great, a substantial, abrupt, local change in the electrical charge difference across the membrane may occur and spread to neighboring portions of the membrane, sweeping around the cell body and down the axon.

Front 11

What is the brief, all-or-nothing change in electrical charge called?

Back 11

Action potential

Front 12

What type of neurons are the A1 and A2 receptors linked to?

Back 12

Interneurons

Front 13

What is a ganglion?

Back 13

A neural structure composed of a highly organized mass of neurons

Front 14

What is the A1 receptor sensitive to?

Back 14

Ultrasounds of low to moderate intensity

Front 15

When does the A2 receptor begin to produce action potentials?

Back 15

Only when an ultrasound is relatively loud

Front 16

Does the A1 receptor fire more frequently to pulses of sound or steady, uninterrupted sounds?

Back 16

Pulses of sound

Front 17

What is the rate of firing in the A1 cell proportional to?

Back 17

The loudness of the sound

Front 18

What does the correlation between the rate of firing in the A1 cell and the loudness of the sound tell the moth?

Back 18

Tells the moth whether a bat is flying toward it or not

Front 19

What happens if the predator is higher than the moth?

Back 19

With every up-and-down movement of the insect's sings, there will be a corresponding fluctuation in the rate of firing of the A1 receptors as they are exposed to, then shielded from, the bat cries by the wings.

Front 20

What happens if the bat is lower than the moth?

Back 20

There will be no such fluctuation in neural activity.

Front 21

What must a moth to in order to employ its antidetection response?

Back 21

A moth must orient itself so as to synchronize the activity of the two A1 receptors.

Front 22

What happens when the moth turns away from the relatively intense ultrasound reaching one side of its body?

Back 22

It will reach a point at which both A1 cells are equally active; at this moment, it will be facing in the opposite direction from the bat and will be heading away from danger.

Front 23

What happens when both A1 receptors are activated?

Back 23

Moth knows it is heading away from the bat

Front 24

Is a moth safe when it executes a successful power dive and reaches a bush or grassy spot?

Back 24

Yes, because echoes from the leaves or grass at the moths' crash-landing site mask those coming from the moth itself

Front 25

When a bat is about to collide with a moth, is the intensity of the sound waves reaching the insect's ears high or low?

Back 25

High

Front 26

Is the A2 receptor necessary?

Back 26

No

Front 27

What is the int-1 cell part of?

Back 27

A neural circuit that helps the cricket respond to ultrasound

Front 28

What happens in crickets with temporarily inactivated int-1 cells?

Back 28

They do not attempt to steer away from ultrasound

Front 29

What does experimental activation of int-1 cells do in crickets?

Back 29

Causes the cricket to bend its abdomen

Front 30

What is the flight path of a cricket controlled by?

Back 30

The position of the insect's hind leg, which, when lifted into a hindwing, alters the beat of that wing and thereby changes the cricket's position in space

Front 31

What happens in a cricket that lacks the appropriate hind leg to act as a bake?

Back 31

Both hindwings continue to beat unimpeded when the cricket was exposed to ultrasound

Front 32

What does ultrasound coming from the right of the cricket do to the creature?

Back 32

Causes the leg on the opposite side of the body to be lifted up into the sing

Front 33

Describe the escape response of the sea slug

Back 33

1. Sensory receptor cells in the skin detect certain chemicals on the tube feet of its enemy
2. Relay messages to interneurons, among them the dorsal ramp interneurons, (DRI), which upon receipt of sufficiently strong stimulation, begin to fire steadily
3. Sends a stream of excitatory signals to a small group of interneurons, (DSI), which are part of an assembly of interconnected cells, among them the ventral swim interneurons, (VSi), and cerebral neuron 2, (C), as well as the flexion neurons

Front 34

What does the capacity of the simple neural network headed by the DRI to impose order on the activity of the motor neurons that control the dorsal and ventral flexion muscles mean?

Back 34

Means that this mechanism qualifies as a central pattern generator

Front 35

What is stimulus filtering?

Back 35

The ability of neurons and neural networks to ignore vast amounts of potential information in order to focus on biologically relevant elements within the diverse stimuli bombarding an animal.

Front 36

Do the A1 receptors discriminate between different ultrasonic frequencies? Why?

Back 36

No; their only task is to detect cues associated with the echolocating predators

Front 37

What sort of frequency limitations are imposed by environmental changes?

Back 37

In the winter, recordings form the female's battery of auditory neurons reveal that very few individual cells are tuned to sound frequencies over 100 kHz. Males are not singing at this time, and therefore, females presumably have little to gain by detecting and analyzing the whole range of sound frequencies in male songs

Front 38

How many appendages are on each side of the nose of the star-nosed mole?

Back 38

11 on each side

Front 39

What are Eimer's organs?

Back 39

Thousands of tiny sensory devices on the 22 fleshy appendages of the star-nosed mole

Front 40

The relay system in the star-nosed mole is biased toward inputs from appendage 11. How is this reflected in the brain tissue?

Back 40

There is disproportionate investment in brain tissue to decode tactile signals from one part of the nose; mirrored on a larger scale by the biases evident in the somatosensory cortex as a whole

Front 41

What is a listener's perception of a spoken language heavily influenced by?

Back 41

The moving lips of a speaker

Front 42

When does the superior temporal sulcus of the brain become active?

Back 42

When we veiw moving mouths, hands, and eyes; also activated by certain static visual stimuli, especially those associated with faces

Front 43

What part of the brain is face recognition dependent on?

Back 43

Dependent on an intact fusiform gyrus; people who have suffered an injury to this part of the brian are no longer able to recognize people by their faces

Front 44

What are different sections on the bottom of the brain devoted to?

Back 44

Different kinds of visual analyses

Front 45

What is the evolutionary benefit of remembering faces?

Back 45

Those better at remembering who was friend and who was foe, and at deducting the intentions of others by examining their faces, were better fit

Front 46

What imaging technique can be used to monitor hippocampal activity in fully conscious people?

Back 46

Magnetic resonance imaging

Front 47

What did people who were better able to navigate through a virtual town depend more heavily on?

Back 47

The right hippocampus

Front 48

Where are our learned mental maps stored?

Back 48

THe hippocampus

Front 49

How do the brains of taxi drivers in London, (who can remember the locations of thousands of addresses before receiving their license), differ?

Back 49

Larger posterior hippocampus

Front 50

Is there a correlation between the years of taxi driving and the increase in size of the posterior hippocampus

Back 50

Yes

Front 51

Give examples of animals that are able to navigate through unfamiliar area.

Back 51

Honey bees can make a beeline back to its hive after meandering outward for food; Homing pigeons can make a pigeon-line back to its loft after having been released in a distant and strange location

Front 52

How do honey bees navigate?

Back 52

A honey bee leaving hits hive notes the position of the sun in the sky relative to the hive as it flies off on a foraging trip; compensate for the sun's movement, thanks to an internal clock mechanism

Front 53

How do honey beens compensate for the sun's movement?

Back 53

Internal clock mechanism

Front 54

If bees are trapped for three hours and moved to a new location, at which point the hive is released, how do the bees look for food that would normally bee 300 m due east?

Back 54

Go 300 m due east to where it "should be;" they compensate for the 45-degree shift in the position of the sun that has take place during their 3-hour confinement

Front 55

How can you reset a pigeon's biological clock/

Back 55

By placing the bird in a closed room with artificial lighting and then shifting the light and dark periods out f phase with sunrise and sunset in the real world. A pigeon exposed to this routine for several days would become clock-shifted 6 hours out of phase with the natural day.

Front 56

What happens if the clock-shifted pigeon is released back into daylight some distance away from its loft?

Back 56

The bird will behaves as if the sun has been up for 6 hours, which will cause it to orient improperly

Front 57

How do monarch butterflies navigate?

Back 57

Attend to the sun's position in the sky

Front 58

WHat wavelengths are critical for the navigational orientation of monarch butterflies?

Back 58

UV

Front 59

WHat happened when a team covered a monarch butterfly flight cage with a UV interference filter?

Back 59

Many stopped flying altogether

Front 60

What does UV light help monarch butterflies do?

Back 60

Helps them start flying in the right direction.

Front 61

What do butterflies use to maintain their compass orientation once UV light has set them in flight?

Back 61

Use cues provided by the three-dimensional polarized skylight pattern

Front 62

How did researchers establish the fact that monarchs can orient to polarized light?

Back 62

Tethered butterflies captured on their fall migration in a small walled arena where the insects could not see the sun, but could look at the sky overhead. When butterflies flew they were able to orient consistently to the southwest. When the polarized light filter was turned 90 degrees from its original orientation, butterflies altered their flight orientation by 90 degrees as well

Front 63

Where do green sea turtles navigate between?

Back 63

Nesting beaches on Ascension, (a tiny island in the middle of the South Atlantic Ocean), and their feeding grounds off the coast of Brazil

Front 64

Green sea turtles travel during the night, so what do they use as navigational cues?

Back 64

Earth's magnetic field

Front 65

How did researchers show that green sea turtles use earth's magnetic field?

Back 65

Tethered the turtles in a cloth ahrness and plunked them into an "ocean simulator;" pool was surrounded by a computer-drive magnetic coil system that the researches used to atler the magnetic fiedl around the pool; if the magnetic field was one that a turtle would encounter 340 kilometers to the south, the turtles would orient in such a way as to head north.