Behavioral ecology

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 that are the proximate causes, ontogeny, survival value, and phylogeny of behavior. 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 that are the proximate causes, ontogeny, survival value, and phylogeny of behavior. If an organism has a trait that provides a selective advantage (i.e., has adaptive significance) in its environment, then natural selection favors it. Adaptive significance refers to the expression of a trait that affects fitness, measured by an individual's reproductive success. Adaptive traits are those that produce more copies of the individual's genes in future generations. Maladaptive traits are those that leave fewer. For example, if a bird that can call more loudly attracts more mates, then a loud call is an adaptive trait for that species because a louder bird mates more frequently than less loud birds—thus sending more loud-calling genes into future generations. Individuals are always in competition with others for limited resources, including food, territories, and mates. Conflict occurs between predators and prey, between rivals for mates, between siblings, mates, and even between parents and offspring. The value of a social behavior depends in part on the social behavior of an animal's neighbors. For example, the more likely a rival male is to back down from a threat, the more value a male gets out of making the threat. The more likely, however, that a rival will attack if threatened, the less useful it is to threaten other males. When a population exhibits a number of interacting social behaviors such as this, it can evolve a stable pattern of behaviors known as an evolutionarily stable strategy (or ESS). This term, derived from economic game theory, became prominent after John Maynard Smith (1982) recognized the possible application of the concept of a Nash equilibrium to model the evolution of behavioral strategies. In short, evolutionary game theory asserts that only strategies that, when common in the population, cannot be 'invaded' by any alternative (mutant) strategy is an ESS, and thus maintained in the population. In other words, at equilibrium every player should play the best strategic response to each other. When the game is two player and symmetric, each player should play the strategy that provides the response best for it. Therefore, the ESS is considered the evolutionary end point subsequent to the interactions. As the fitness conveyed by a strategy is influenced by what other individuals are doing (the relative frequency of each strategy in the population), behavior can be governed not only by optimality but the frequencies of strategies adopted by others and are therefore frequency dependent (frequency dependence).