bio

 Costs Behavioral costs can be broken down into three basic categories: Energy costs Opportunity costs Risk costs Energy costs • Every animal behavior, such as running away from a predator, uses up ATP. When an animal uses metabolic energy for one behavior, such as searching for a mate, that energy is not available for other needs, such as searching for food. Opportunity Costs • Every animal behavior takes time. When an animal spends time doing one behavior, it loses the opportunity to do a different behavior Risk Cost • Many behaviors expose an individual to possible injury or death. All animals have to look for food, but foraging also increases the chance that an animal will meet a predator. In many species, males risk injury by fighting for access to females during the breeding season. Social Behavior Benefits of Social Behavior Living in a social group provides significant benefits to individuals within the group.  Living in a group may lead to improved foraging, as an ind...

 Communication Animals use communication as a way to keep in contact with one another, raise alarm in the presence of danger, and attract a mate. Types of Communication Visual • Gestures or postures, such as the submissive posture of a dog with its tail between its legs, may help to identify an animal’s status in the group. Sound • Animals often use calls to identify offspring, such as the specific call shared between a young penguin and its parents. Alarm calls and distress calls alert others to the presence of a threat. Touch • Bees use their antennae, for example, to interpret the waggle dance performed by a scout bee in order to locate a food source outside the hive. Chemical • Some animals communicate by using pheromones. Pheromones are chemicals released by an animal that affect the behavior of other individuals of the same species.

 Mate selection Courtship displays are behaviors most often used by male members of a species to attract females. Scientists theorize that females use courtship displays to judge the condition of their potential mate or the quality of his genes. Defense behavior used by a nonhuman animal to avoid being harmed by another. This might involve defensive aggression against a potential predator or against a member of its own species, from its own group or an outside group, or animal escape behavior to avoid the source of harm.