Browsing by Subject "animal behavior"

Now showing 1 - 6 of 6
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    Choosiness as a component of life history strategies in cabbage white butterflies
    (2017-07) Jaumann, Sarah
    Many animals are choosy when selecting resources such as mates, food, or sites to lay eggs. For animals that lay eggs and do not subsequently care for their young, choosing the best sites for their eggs can greatly increase the survival and health of their offspring. Given these benefits, it is surprising that there is variation in choosiness; not all animals are choosy when laying eggs. Behaviors can be costly if they require energy and exhibit trade-offs with other traits that also require energy. I applied this idea to choosiness during oviposition, testing the hypothesis that animals are not choosy when being choosy is costly. In cabbage white butterflies, I demonstrated variation in choosiness and a trade-off between choosiness and fecundity, suggesting that being choosy is costly. If energetic costs determine degree of choosiness, then manipulating energy from food should lead to variation in choosiness. I manipulated food availability directly by varying nutrition and indirectly by varying butterfly density and thus potential competition for food. Density did not affect choosiness or other traits, but nutrition did. Poor adult nutrition led to lower levels of choosiness and lower fecundity but no changes in other traits. Thus, poor nutrition may decrease investment in multiple traits, including choosiness, rather than causing adaptive shifts in life history with increased investment in some traits. My results suggest that choosiness is energetically costly, but only direct cues about energy availability affect choosiness. These findings have implications for the health of butterflies and other pollinators.
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    Complex signals and perceiver behavior
    (2015-12) Rubi, Tricia
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    Data supporting "Informational Masking Constrains Vocal Communication in Nonhuman Animals"
    (2023-01-09) Gupta, Saumya; Kalra, Lata; Rose, Gary J; Bee, Mark A; gupta333@umn.edu; Gupta, Saumya
    Noisy social environments constrain human speech communication in two important ways: spectrotemporal overlap between signals and noise can reduce speech audibility (“energetic masking”) and noise can also interfere with processing the informative features of otherwise audible speech (“informational masking”). To date, informational masking has not been investigated in studies of vocal communication in nonhuman animals, even though many animals make evolutionarily consequential decisions that depend on processing vocal information in noisy social environments. In this study of a treefrog, in which females choose mates in noisy breeding choruses, we investigated whether informational masking disrupts the processing of vocal information in the contexts of species recognition and sexual selection. The associated data for this work is being released prior to the publication of the manuscript for peer review.
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    From Soil to Squirrel: The Legacy of Lead Pollution & Its Effects on Urban Wildlife Behavior
    (2024-04-18) Schulz, Rachel K; Devitz, Amy-Charlotte; Snell-Rood, Emilie C
    Urbanization increasingly threatens wildlife through the introduction of novel threats and pollution. Animals can use behavior to adapt to urban environments and urban pollutants drive changes in behavior, leading to populations of urban wildlife with some behaviors that are distinct from rural populations. Lead (Pb) pollution is ubiquitous in urban areas, but there can be significant local variation in soil lead levels. In this study, I examined the relationship between soil lead, hair lead, docility, and aggressive and social behavior in eastern gray squirrels (Sciurus carolinensis) and eastern chipmunks (Tamias striatus) in Minneapolis and Saint Paul, Minnesota. Docility was measured through a struggle test and aggressive and social responses were measured in a mirror image stimulation trial. Soil lead and hair lead were significantly positively correlated in gray squirrels and chipmunks, and there was no difference in hair lead based on species or sex. Chipmunks had significantly longer struggle times than gray squirrels, but struggle time did not vary based on hair lead or sex. Only six of 235 animals displayed aggression in the mirror image stimulation trial, and frequency of contacting the mirror in a nonaggressive way was not correlated with hair lead, species, or sex. These results provide correlational evidence of lead transfer from soils to gray squirrels and chipmunks, though the magnitude of lead accumulation does not seem to depend on the distinct life histories of these two species. At the levels currently present in these urban environments, lead does not affect aggressive or social behavior in gray squirrels or chipmunks. Future studies should examine aggression through direct observation rather than a mirror image stimulation trial to better quantify aggression in these species that have low territorial aggression.
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    The Information Economics of Social Interactions
    (2019-02) Heinen, Virginia
    When animals should attend to information is a diverse and fascinating topic, with answers ranging from neurological mechanisms to evolutionary forces. The broad theme of this thesis is examining learning and information use and social interactions from a game theoretical perspective, but I use this framework to address two distinct topics. The first half of my thesis is a fairly traditional investigation hypotheses about animals’ use of social information in uncertain environments, and how social information use fits within the broader interaction of environmental certainty and information reliability. The second half introduces the more novel topic of behavioral conventions, or coordination problems with multiple equilibria, and how topics in behavioral ecology can benefit from a conventions perspective. Through investigating conventions in general, and conventional communication specifically, I develop a novel laboratory system for investigating learned conventional communication.
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    Sexual Selection Constrained: The Expression of Mating Preferences in Acoustically Communicating Animals
    (2018-08) Tanner, Jessie
    Across animal taxa, receivers exert selection on signals and signalers through mate choice. More than a century of research has sought to uncover the targets of this selection and estimate its strength, often using behavioral assays in which receivers discriminate among signals. However, the existence of mating preferences thus discovered does not guarantee their expression in natural signaling contexts. Mating preferences may vary across an individual receiver’s lifetime due to intrinsic factors such as age or mating status. Signals are complex, meaning they comprise multiple components. Individual signalers may differ from one another on the basis of multiple components simultaneously, causing selection on one trait to modulate or reverse the selection on another trait. Additionally, signals are produced repeatedly and traits vary within as well as between signalers, introducing the potential for within-individual variation in signal production to influence the expression of mating preferences. Finally, environmental noise may limit signal recognition, localization, or discrimination in natural settings. Here, I explore these constraints on the expression of mating preferences that impose sexual selection.