What does the fox say? ALOT! Each yip, growl, howl and cry is a response to a stimulus in its environment and aids in the fox’s survival and overall reproductive success.
What does the fox say? ALOT! Each yip, growl, howl and cry is a response to a stimulus in its environment and aids in the fox’s survival and overall reproductive success. (0:30) Survive long enough to pass on those genes and use every trick in your biological power to do so (1:39). Melanie recAPs a variety of examples ranging from phototropism (2:13) and shark blood detection (4:30) to honeybees (5:56).
The Question of the Day asks (7:53) This is the state animals enter when they lower their metabolic rate in summer months.
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Hi and welcome to the APsolute Recap: Biology Edition. Today’s episode will recap Responses to the Environment
Lets Zoom out:
Unit 8 - Ecology
Topic 8.1
Big idea - Energetics & Information Storage and Transmission
I have a question for you - What does the fox say? No - really! The ability to produce sound is common throughout much of the animal kingdom, but the ability to have language - that's even more directed. It turns out that the fox says a lot! And each yip, growl, howl and cry is a response to a stimulus in its environment and aids in the fox’s survival and overall reproductive success.
Let’s Zoom in:
This topic is very broad. Remember, you are not required to know details of specific communications or community behavioral systems for the exam. This episode will focus on WHY responding to the environment is so important for organisms first and then provide several examples. If these examples are completely foreign to you - that's ok! There are also no specific physiological or behavioral mechanisms required in this unit.
All species need to respond to stimuli in their internal and external environment. These cues trigger coordinated mechanisms for growth, reproduction and homeostasis. But the primary goal here is to affect the organisms overall fitness. Fitness is an organism's ability to survive and reproduce in a particular environment. More simply - survive long enough to pass on those genes and use every trick in your biological power to do so.
It's no secret that plants like sunlight. Photoperiodism is when plants regulate their reproductive stages in response to sunlight and length of day. Other types of plants exhibit phototropism, which is directional growth towards sunlight. You may have observed this in your own home with plants adjacent to windows. The plant seems to bend towards the window over time. There is some really great time lapse footage of this process online, so go to the Google. Animals also modify their behavior in response to external stimuli. It might be light, or sounds, maybe smells from foods or even chemicals from potential mates! Taxis is directional movement towards or away from a stimuli whereas kinesis is undirected or random movement. Another Example of animal behavior in response to stimuli is the difference between nocturnal and diurnal organisms. Nocturnal animals like bats are most active at night whereas diurnal organisms, like squirrels, are most active during the daytime. A common reason for an organisms' timed activity is to avoid predators while finding food or mates.
Animals have diverse strategies to communicate. After all, they are multicellular with cell and tissue differentiation - developed into a wide variety of sense organs. Animals can communicate visually, audibly, tacitly, electrically, or chemically. Shark week is typically in August on Animal Planet. Although theatrically enhanced, one of the common factoids is that great white sharks can detect a single drop of blood well, alot of water from a great distance (actual amount and distance varies - but it’s impressive) They can also detect directional muscular contractions in their prey with their electoral lateral line system. So cool. These are both food finding techniques. By contrast, the wolf howls to indicate dominance in the pack and urinates on a tree to establish territory and attract a mate. However, some scents are intentionally repulsive - think the skunk’s spray - and often comes with a visual precursor as well to warn predators. And then, there are birds. From the coloration of male peacock feathers to the elaborate dances of the birds of paradise in New Guinea - sometimes you have to give all the visual cues to get noticed by the ladies. These are all strategies of communication.
Honeybees are fascinating (well I guess fascinating if you aren’t allergic to bee stings). They are social insects that live in highly structured colonies and provide a great example of cooperative behavior. The singular queen bee modifies her egg-laying behavior depending on pollen collection. Worker bees are underdeveloped females that forage for food and perform the figure 8 “waggle dance” to tell other workers where to find pollen. The food’s distance from the hive and the angle from the sun the bee needs to travel are both communicated through this dance. Once again - go to the google to see. Drones have no stingers and don’t gather food - but they are male and do mate with the queen to reproduce. Other examples of cooperative behavior include herding in sheep, schooling in fish, and predator warning in prairie dogs. To the google for that noise - it's quite ear piercing.
Time for unit connections. Fitness is referenced in Unit 3 on the molecular level and Unit 7 for Natural selection. Natural selection favors behaviors (either innate or learned) that increase survival of populations. Alright - what about the exam? A really common lab with this topic is the use of choice chambers with insects - often pill bugs. Whether you’ve completed this experiment or not, be prepared to use Chi-square analysis on a null hypothesis related to taxis and kinesis data. This is a great topic to also identify dependent and independent variables within an experiment. There’s a lot of graphing with behaviors!
To recap……
First you receive the stimulus in your environment and then you respond to it. No matter the strategy, communication to members of your own species and others influences evolutionary fitness.
Coming up next on the Apsolute RecAP Biology Edition: Metabolism and energy
Today’s question of the day is about behaviors
Question of the day:This is the state animals enter when they lower their metabolic rate in summer months.