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Behavioral ecology, also spelled behavioural ecology, is the study of the evolutionary basis for animal behavior due to ecological pressures. Behavioral ecology emerged from ethology after Niko Tinbergen outlined four questions to address when studying animal behaviors: What are the proximate causes, ontogeny, survival value, and phylogeny of a behavior?
For example, adaptive behavior is a mechanism of population stabilization. [23] In natural communities, organisms are able to interact with each other creating complex food webs and predator-prey dynamics. Adaptive behavior helps modulate the dynamics of feeding relationships by having a direct effect on their feeding traits and strategies. [23]
In evolutionary biology, adaptive radiation is a process in which organisms diversify rapidly from an ancestral species into a multitude of new forms, particularly when a change in the environment makes new resources available, alters biotic interactions or opens new environmental niches.
However, it is not clear what "relatively small" should mean, for example polyploidy in plants is a reasonably common large genetic change. [22] The origin of eukaryotic endosymbiosis is a more dramatic example. [23] All adaptations help organisms survive in their ecological niches. The adaptive traits may be structural, behavioural or ...
Adaptive value is an essential concept of population genetics. It represents usefulness of a trait that can help an organism to survive in its environment. This heritable trait that can help offspring to cope with the new surrounding or condition is a measurable quantity. [ 2 ]
The term "adaptive zone" was coined by the paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson to explain how a population could jump from one niche to another that suited it, jump to an 'adaptive zone', made available by virtue of some modification, or possibly a change in the food chain, that made the adaptive zone available to it without a discontinuity ...
The rate of adaptive evolution in the human genome has often been assumed to be constant over time. For example, the 35% estimate for α calculated by Fay et al. (2001) led them to conclude that there was one adaptive substitution in the human lineage every 200 years since human divergence from old-world monkeys. However, even if the original ...
Phenotypic plasticity refers to some of the changes in an organism's behavior, morphology and physiology in response to a unique environment. [1] [2] Fundamental to the way in which organisms cope with environmental variation, phenotypic plasticity encompasses all types of environmentally induced changes (e.g. morphological, physiological, behavioural, phenological) that may or may not be ...