11-15-06, More on behavior

Here's the morning's question. First of all, yesterday we did our nature walk, and you were more fortunate because there was much more nature out than there was late (fifth period). Let's talk about the adaptive ramifications of the types of the behaviors that we saw yesterday.

What we were trying to observe other than the lizard running over Lauren, and yes, we found a beautiful snake yesterday, about 18 inches long, and it was the most beautiful green, very sharp and true color and he was quite calm when we finally caught him, he worked very hard to avoid being caught, and he climbed along the arms and so on, he was such the nice snake and after debating whether or not to keep him we decided no and let him go. All snakes are carnivorous and all snakes eat something and you can't feed them dog food and you can't do that because there's no heat to it and they can't find it.

You can get frozen rats and then you nuke them in the microwave. No, apparently it will not smell up the microwave. You just have to warm it up enough to get the snake to be able to see it.

Anyway, talk about what we saw on the nature talk and the ramifications of innate behavior. There are four kinds of innate behaviors—kinesis (random behavior), taxis which are positives and negatives behaviors, and then there are reflexes, and so on. The fire ants swarming was an innate behavior. The spider running under the electrical outlet was a negative taxis. The lizard losing his tale is not a behavior—that's an anatomical thing. He does not throw his tail off. That tail is loosely attached.

The two invertebrate organisms that you kind of ignored was the hundred of butterflies and the many numbers of grasshopper. When you walk up to grasshoppers, they jump away, it's a negative taxis and it's a reflex arc. Anatomically, the reflex, well, you know that insect eyes are multi-faceted and they detect light in different ways than our eyes do. When the light changes, and imagine light shinning through the prism and separating the colors into ROYGBIV (the seven colors), and the eyes refract that light and any change in that light will cause the trigger of the reflex arc.

In order to catch a grasshopper you have to make sure that no light change is made. The light changes causes changes. You can catch them at night because they are cold-blooded. They have reflexes that are slowed down so significantly because of the temperature and so on that they aren't really sleeping but they will not move much. They are full of this juice and when this juice cools down they are basically “stuck” there. They warm up the next day when you put them on a fish cook.

Talk about the adaptive value of the behaviors that we talked about. The adaptive value of the behavior is related to where organisms come from and the history of the earth and so on, Darwin's ideas were connected to the ecological principles today, and how does behavior fit into those concepts?

Certain behaviors will be deselected and others will be selected. Genetic behaviors are identified by natural selection. Behaviors are identified by natural selection. What happens to grasshoppers that do not refract light in the proper way? Or when they do not reflex properly? The behavior is programmed—the light is a physical thing. They get caught. They get eaten. And so on.

You may have not noticed, but there are two types of grasshoppers out there. And grasshoppers either fly straight up or fly straight away from their location. Talk about positive and negative taxis.

Look at the multifaceted eye of the grasshopper. Should the predator come from above, what is the advantage of turning on which negative taxis, and that one is the one that has them flying low to the ground. They will try to avoid the predator from above. If the light is refracted from the posterior angle then they go up. Again, we are looking at adaptive defensive behavior and the ones that do not do either of those two things, they get eaten or caught and put on a fish hook.

Adaptive behavior is produced by natural selection. Adaptive behavior can first and foremost be defensive behavior. That'd be the grasshoppers jumping away when you poke them or get closer to them. Worms burrowed down deeper and the worms and rollie pollies would try to dig deeper. What else?

You touched the scorpion we saw it flick its tail forward. The scorpion did not know what it was. It was just going to attack whatever it was that it was touching it.

Scorpions are not evil. They are incredibly low on the evolutionary chain. They are not evil. You cannot personify animals. They do not have malicious intent. Scorpions also have incredibly poor vision. The whole body of the scorpion is so low on the evolutionary scale. They are carnivorous and they will feed on ants, and the larger scorpions (desert scorpions in Saudi Arabi) will kill small lizards and frogs. Scorpions normally do not use their poison as the offensive—normally only defensive. The scorpions at Jack C. Hays high school is mild—the desert scorpions of Arizona are much more powerful. At least two or three times a year you will see deaths attributed to scorpion stings in Arizona.

They have powerful venom. The Arabs will say, “don't play with them, don't mess with them,” and if you are in the wilderness and you take your shoes off at night, they will hide in your boots and you want to shake them out in the morning or else.

In South America there is a tarantula called the bird tarantula and it perches and extends its fangs and captures birds. Spiders have eight appendages. They walk on six of those and they have two smaller appendages that extend from the anterior end and they are covered in tiny hairs. Insects have antennaes and spiders get their two hairy appendages at the anterior end.

The common American tarantula can be pretty big. The bird tarantula is basically as huge as the Dixie paper plates. They are huge. They are about nine inches in diameter. However, if it is going to bite you, it will probably not effect you in any way. They may effect your ability to judge size, apparently.

You have to understand that natural selection determines the extremity of those organisms. You are talking about Saudi Arabi or Kewait or Northern Africa or the jungles of South America, is you are talking about areas where if the predators do not have an extremely fine-tuned killing system, then the prey gets away. For a scorpion to run across a prey animal does not happen every day. There are vast amount of areas where when you consider the total biomass of the ecosystem it's really relatively small compared to the amount of land.

When something comes by, it needs to zap it right there and stop it in its tracks immediately, and so the prey does not run away. The sea snake is the most venomous organism. Fish are rather elusive and do not have much body heat, and once the sea snake strikes, it's going to die, and if they swim away then the sea snake will not be able to get the food. Once some sort of sea snake bites you have about thirty minutes to get to the hospital or else you're going to die. You almost have to intentionally make angry the sea snake to get it to bite you. They are reef organisms and they do not stay close to the shore.

The effects of the poison is basically instantaneous and it is extremely painful, it's a neurotoxin and causes your muscle to contract, and you will know when you are bitten by the sea snake.

There are species of poisonous snakes that live around the Dominica Republica and it's called Snake Island and it's not a specific sea snake. It's another type of snake. The most dangerous snake is basically the sea snake. The ten most poisonous snakes in the world, and seven of them live in Australia. And of the 10 most venomous spiders, 8 of them live in Australia (talking in terms of species and so on).

Why are those behaviors so consistent in Australia? The answer again is natural selection. We are not talking about what man has gone in to build. We are talking about Australia in the natural state. It is very inhospitable. It's either the jungle or the outback and there's not much biomass per square foot. Any sort of prey that the carnivore runs across, well, they need to be able to zap it right then and there.

Spiders have developed physical defense mechanisms (poisons) that keep them from being preyed upon and if they are preyed upon the predator pays the ultimate price. Now, what other kind of selective behaviors are you going to see in a wild population? What is the adaptive value of a behavior?

The social behaviors of the population are of importance as well. Social behaviors describe the cooperative relationships among members of some species. This flock flies as one bird. Have you ever seen them? They fly together in formation as one sort of bird. These are the little gray tweety birds (not really the right name). They are little tiny birds. Here is what they do, there were probably 18 to 25 birds in this flock, and they came out of the tree, and one of them turned and they all turned, one swooped to the left and they all swooped to the left, and so on.

How is that behavior helpful to the birds? What kind of behaviors do we see in that formation? It provides many eyes for them. It makes them look more intimidating and makes them look as if they are one organism. How is the formation detrimental to the health of the group? The detrimental part of the behavior is that the individuals and the ones on the outside are the ones that are threatened and so on. No matter how safe it is for the flock there are specific individuals being placed in jeopardy and so on. And the problem is that through this adaptive behavior and over many generations they lose their sensitivity to individualism and gain social interactions and so on.

Coyotes hunt in pairs. They are sort of like pack animals and they have extremely cooperative behavior even in two's. One of them will obtain an ambush position and another one circles the prey forcing the animal to run to the coyote doing the ambushing.

Penguins when they are about to go swimming will push the first guy in line into the water and then if that one pops back up then there's no seal to worry about and so on. You need to be the big penguin if you are going to be pushing others around. The big ones are more capable of avoiding the seals. If the small one is captured by the seal, the others know that it's not time to go swimming, and you are also getting rid of that particular genotype. That's really effective. It's adaptive and has been selected over many, many generations.

Penguins are another good example because they swim in mass. They are all black and white. When a predator comes in and sees this flock of swimming penguins and they all turn, it makes it very difficult for the predator to identify a single bird. The predators only sees stripes and stripes and so on with zebras.

Recessive genes never disappear from a population. You have no idea what's hybrid and what's pure and so on so there will always be small penguins. It is very unlikely that the organisms with recessive genes will all be killed off so that the dominant ones survive (it's very, very unlikely).

Making sense with adaptive behavior is difficult. Some animals spend time with only one mate. Some animals are polygamous because natural selection says that it is the best chance for survival of the population. The white tale deer around here is polygamous and the best chance for the survival of the species is to have the biggest buck to breed all around in the region to pass on the good genes.

In geese, it's something different, apparently they have to consistently produce as many eggs as the geese produce so that they always have the eggs in the population. Anyway, when you ask questions about animals and plants, then the answer is always going to be “natural selection says that that is the best way to survive as a species,” not as an individual.

We have talked about social behavior and secondly now we have reproductive behavior. Organisms live for two reasons. First of all, they live for selfish purposes (individual survival) and more importantly to pass on the genetics of the species and so on. So, whatever behavior is positive to those two outcomes is going to be selected by that environment.

Speaking of penguins and seals, talking about learned behavior maybe tomorrow, off of the coast of Argentina on the Atlantic side there is this pod of 20 seals or something. There behavior is passed on from one generation to another. There is this breeding pod of “killer-whale food” seals and so on and during the pupping season and when the pups move from the shore into the water, the seals have developed this set of behaviors that has them rushing them towards the water so they would only lose one seal per rush. They stay up just beyond the water line. What the whales have learned to do over the course of many generations is to create their own wave, and they will spy-hop and see the mother seal and her pup and they will create their own wave by going back and forth and have this water build-up on their spouts and they push the water onto the wave and they will snatch the sea off of the small beach and then they will roll back onto the water and take the seal back into the ocean and play catch with it and so on.

These are very special killer whales. The behavior biologists have noticed that this behavior does not appear anywhere else in the world. We know a lot about killer whales than we used to. We know that they prey on other dolphins. We know that killer whales predate blue whales and not sperm whales but others and so on. They eat blue whales very slowly, kind of like an elephant—one bite at a time.

When the blue whale dies, when anything dies, there is a series of enzymatic reactions that occurs in the body of the vertebrate animal and many of these enzymatic reactions produce methane gas and if you have ever been around a dead animal, it produces methane gas, and methane gas is less dense than water, and the organism floats until they have eaten enough of it and then the `balloon pops'. And that's a ton of meat for killer whales. They are very cooperative pods. Killer whales have this status that is passed on from year to year.

Adaptive behavior, reproductive behavior, social behavior, selfish behavior and that is what you are describing because it increases the individual's chances of reproduction. And then the last one is altruistic behavior that helps others and decreases the organism's own chance of reproduction.

When a killer whale is injured in the pod, it is very very common for another to have altruist behavior. When a member of the pod is injured in the gigantic battle with sperm whales or something, and another member of the pod tries to force it to the surface when it needs to breath until either the organism gets better or needs to die.

There are few predators that focus on injured killer whales. That organism is decreasing its reproductive success. To increase it, stay in the pod, not by staying out in the ocean until it dies or gets well, and that seemingly stupid behavior is altruism and this can be seen in wolves, chimpanzees, and so on.

Because we described that behavior as selfish or altruistic when we talk about animals, it is still naturally selected behavior and not personified. Scorpions are not evil.