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Optimal Foraging Theory
Optimal foraging theory (OFT) is a behavioral ecology model that helps predict how an animal behaves when searching for food. Although obtaining food provides the animal with energy, searching for and capturing the food require both energy and time. To maximize fitness, an animal adopts a foraging strategy that provides the most benefit (energy) for the lowest cost, maximizing the net energy gained. OFT helps predict the best strategy that an animal can use to achieve this goal. OFT is an ecological application of the optimality model. This theory assumes that the most economically advantageous foraging pattern will be selected for in a species through natural selection. When using OFT to model foraging behavior, organisms are said to be maximizing a variable known as the currency, such as the most food per unit time. In addition, the constraints of the environment are other variables that must be considered. Constraints are defined as factors that can limit the forager's abili ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Abeille Butinant Une Fleur 3
Abeille may refer to: Ships * HMS ''Abeille'' (1796), a ship of the Royal Navy *'' Abeille Bourbon'', a high sea tow vessel *'' Abeille Flandre'', a high sea tug of the French navy *'' Abeille Liberté'', a salvage tug *'' Abeille Provence'', a salvage tug, later the ''Ryan Leet'' * ST Abeille No 7, a tug, originally the ''Empire Helen'' * ST Abeille No 8, a tug, originally the ''Empire Simon'' * ST Abeille No 22, a tug, originally the ''Empire Alfred'' * ST Abeille No 23, a tug, originally the ''Empire Sprite'' People * Abeille de Perrin (1843-1910), full name Elzéar Emmanuel Arène Abeille de Perrin, French entomologist * Scipion Abeille (died 1697), French physician * Gaspard Abeille (1648-1718), French poet * Pierre-César Abeille (1674-after 1733), French composer * Guy Abeille, French economist * Louis Paul Abeille (1719-1807), French economist * Ludwig Abeille (1761-1838), German pianist and composer * Rafael Nieto Abeillé, Puerto Rican lawyer Other uses *SNCAC NC.200 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Parasitoid Wasp
Parasitoid wasps are a large group of hymenopteran superfamilies, with all but the wood wasps (Orussoidea) being in the wasp-waisted Apocrita. As parasitoids, they lay their eggs on or in the bodies of other arthropods, sooner or later causing the death of these hosts. Different species specialise in hosts from different insect orders, most often Lepidoptera, though some select beetles, flies, or bugs; the spider wasps (Pompilidae) exclusively attack spiders. Parasitoid wasp species differ in which host life-stage they attack: eggs, larvae, pupae, or adults. They mainly follow one of two major strategies within parasitism: either they are endoparasitic, developing inside the host, and koinobiont, allowing the host to continue to feed, develop, and moult; or they are ectoparasitic, developing outside the host, and idiobiont, paralysing the host immediately. Some endoparasitic wasps of the superfamily Ichneumonoidea have a mutualistic relationship with polydnaviruses, the viru ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Crypsis
In ecology, crypsis is the ability of an animal or a plant to avoid observation or detection by other animals. It may be a predation strategy or an antipredator adaptation. Methods include camouflage, nocturnality, subterranean lifestyle and mimicry. Crypsis can involve visual, olfactory (with pheromones) or auditory concealment. When it is visual, the term cryptic coloration, effectively a synonym for animal camouflage, is sometimes used, but many different methods of camouflage are employed by animals or plants. Overview There is a strong evolutionary pressure for animals to blend into their environment or conceal their shape, for prey animals to avoid predators and for predators to be able to avoid detection by prey. Exceptions include large herbivores without natural enemies, brilliantly colored birds that rely on flight to escape predators, and venomous or otherwise powerfully armed animals with warning coloration. Cryptic animals include the tawny frogmouth (feat ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Poison Dart Frog
Poison dart frog (also known as dart-poison frog, poison frog or formerly known as poison arrow frog) is the common name of a group of frogs in the family Dendrobatidae which are native to tropical Central and South America. These species are diurnal and often have brightly colored bodies. This bright coloration is correlated with the toxicity of the species, making them aposematic. Some species of the family Dendrobatidae exhibit extremely bright coloration along with high toxicity, while others have cryptic coloration with minimal to no amount of observed toxicity. The species that have great toxicity derive this feature from their diet of ants, mites and termites. However, other species that exhibit cryptic coloration, and low to no amounts of toxicity, eat a much larger variety of prey. Many species of this family are threatened due to human infrastructure encroaching on their habitats. These amphibians are often called "dart frogs" due to the Native Americans' use of the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Porcupine
Porcupines are large rodents with coats of sharp spines, or quills, that protect them against predation. The term covers two families of animals: the Old World porcupines of family Hystricidae, and the New World porcupines of family, Erethizontidae. Both families belong to the infraorder Hystricognathi within the profoundly diverse order Rodentia and display superficially similar coats of rigid or semi-rigid quills, which are modified hairs composed of keratin. Despite this, the two groups are distinct from one another and are not closely related to each other within the Hystricognathi. The largest species of porcupine is the third-largest living rodent in the world, after the capybara and beaver. The Old World porcupines (Hystricidae) live in Italy, Asia (western and southern), and most of Africa. They are large, terrestrial, and strictly nocturnal. The New World porcupines (Erethizontidae) are indigenous to North America and northern South America. They live in wooded ar ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Coevolution
In biology, coevolution occurs when two or more species reciprocally affect each other's evolution through the process of natural selection. The term sometimes is used for two traits in the same species affecting each other's evolution, as well as gene-culture coevolution. Charles Darwin mentioned evolutionary interactions between flowering plants and insects in ''On the Origin of Species'' (1859). Although he did not use the word coevolution, he suggested how plants and insects could evolve through reciprocal evolutionary changes. Naturalists in the late 1800s studied other examples of how interactions among species could result in reciprocal evolutionary change. Beginning in the 1940s, plant pathologists developed breeding programs that were examples of human-induced coevolution. Development of new crop plant varieties that were resistant to some diseases favored rapid evolution in pathogen populations to overcome those plant defenses. That, in turn, required the development o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Prey Switching
Prey switching is frequency-dependent predation, where the predator preferentially consumes the most common type of prey. The phenomenon has also been described as apostatic selection, however the two terms are generally used to describe different parts of the same phenomenon. Apostatic selection has been used by authors looking at the differences between different genetic morphs. In comparison, prey switching has been used when describing the choice between different species.Allen, J.A. (1988) Frequency-dependent selection by predators. Philos. T. Roy. Soc. B 319, 485-503 Definition The term ''switching'' was first coined by the ecologist Murdoch in 1969 to describe the situation where a predator eats disproportionately more of the most common type of prey. Eight years earlier in 1962 the geneticst B. C. Clarke described a similar phenomenon and called it "apostatic selection". Since then the term ''prey switching'' has mainly been used by ecologists, while ''apostatic selection' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sigmoid Curve
A sigmoid function is a mathematical function having a characteristic "S"-shaped curve or sigmoid curve. A common example of a sigmoid function is the logistic function shown in the first figure and defined by the formula: :S(x) = \frac = \frac=1-S(-x). Other standard sigmoid functions are given in the Examples section. In some fields, most notably in the context of artificial neural networks, the term "sigmoid function" is used as an alias for the logistic function. Special cases of the sigmoid function include the Gompertz curve (used in modeling systems that saturate at large values of x) and the ogee curve (used in the spillway of some dams). Sigmoid functions have domain of all real numbers, with return (response) value commonly monotonically increasing but could be decreasing. Sigmoid functions most often show a return value (y axis) in the range 0 to 1. Another commonly used range is from −1 to 1. A wide variety of sigmoid functions including the logistic and hy ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
SDY2
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SDY may refer to: * Sandy railway station, Bedfordshire, England (Station code) * Sidney-Richland Municipal Airport, Montana, United States (IATA Airport Code) *SDY, the ticker symbol for SPDR S&P Dividend exchange-traded fund *the Amtrak station code for Schenectady, NY Schenectady () is a city in Schenectady County, New York, United States, of which it is the county seat. As of the 2020 census, the city's population of 67,047 made it the state's ninth-largest city by population. The city is in eastern New Y ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Functional Response
A functional response in ecology is the intake rate of a consumer as a function of food density (the amount of food available in a given ecotope). It is associated with the numerical response, which is the reproduction rate of a consumer as a function of food density. Following C. S. Holling, functional responses are generally classified into three types, which are called Holling's type I, II, and III. Type I Type I functional response assumes a linear increase in intake rate with food density, either for all food densities, or only for food densities up to a maximum, beyond which the intake rate is constant. The linear increase assumes that the time needed by the consumer to process a food item is negligible, or that consuming food does not interfere with searching for food. A functional response of type I is used in the Lotka–Volterra predator–prey model. It was the first kind of functional response described and is also the simplest of the three functional responses ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Eucalyptus
''Eucalyptus'' () is a genus of over seven hundred species of flowering trees, shrubs or mallees in the myrtle family, Myrtaceae. Along with several other genera in the tribe Eucalypteae, including '' Corymbia'', they are commonly known as eucalypts. Plants in the genus ''Eucalyptus'' have bark that is either smooth, fibrous, hard or stringy, leaves with oil glands, and sepals and petals that are fused to form a "cap" or operculum over the stamens. The fruit is a woody capsule commonly referred to as a "gumnut". Most species of ''Eucalyptus'' are native to Australia, and every state and territory has representative species. About three-quarters of Australian forests are eucalypt forests. Wildfire is a feature of the Australian landscape and many eucalypt species are adapted to fire, and resprout after fire or have seeds which survive fire. A few species are native to islands north of Australia and a smaller number are only found outside the continent. Eucalypts have b ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Koala
The koala or, inaccurately, koala bear (''Phascolarctos cinereus''), is an arboreal herbivorous marsupial native to Australia. It is the only extant representative of the family Phascolarctidae and its closest living relatives are the wombats. The koala is found in coastal areas of the mainland's eastern and southern regions, inhabiting Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, and South Australia. It is easily recognisable by its stout, tailless body and large head with round, fluffy ears and large, spoon-shaped nose. The koala has a body length of and weighs . Fur colour ranges from silver grey to chocolate brown. Koalas from the northern populations are typically smaller and lighter in colour than their counterparts further south. These populations possibly are separate subspecies, but this is disputed. Koalas typically inhabit open '' Eucalyptus'' woodland, as the leaves of these trees make up most of their diet. Because this eucalypt diet has limited nutritional and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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