 All right, great, thank you. What in the world are we going to have time for? We have 30 minutes, huh? OK. Well, you know, some of the material I'm presenting today, frankly, doesn't need to come across in the ecology section because a big part of what I'm presenting today is ethology, the science of animal behavior. I'm presenting it here in ecology because I do think it fits. And I think the link between ethology and ecology can be made stronger and will be made stronger in coming years. But also, you don't get ethology at any other place in this course. Or really, it's kind of hard to get it in an introductory course in the department. We have good advanced courses in it. So I thought it was important to bring in, but I can cut back on it. And that'll be some of what goes today. I'm going to start by looking at the levels of organization concept. It's this orienting generalization that's used in biology for demarcating the boundaries between fields, for demarcating boundaries between natural phenomena, the things we study. So I'll be going over that first. And then I will be looking at the field of ethology. I tend to study animals more than I study plants. And so you get a bias from me toward animals. Bio1B has often been biased toward plants. And so I'll try not to make apologies for my own bias toward animals. A lot of the examples you'll get are from animals. And ethology, the science of individual behavior or the science of animal behavior, is really focused on animals because behaviorally animals are outwardly much more complex than plants are. You can speak of plant behavior if you want as the external activities of a plant. That's its behavior if you define behavior in that way. But really, ethology is a field focused on animals. And so we'll be looking at a few examples, time permitting of learning, problem solving, cognition, and their relationship to ecology, hopefully getting into some behavioral ecology and optimal foraging ideas and finishing with the ecology of social groups. I will move briskly to try to get through this material. A lot of it's just fun. I'm sticking with the theme of trying not to go too fast in terms of information covered in the beginning of this course. So let's just have fun and mostly look at pictures and think about these ideas. What I really hope is that you'll think about it after class and discuss it in your discussions and labs, some of these ideas. The levels of organization concept. You go to almost any biology textbook and you will see something about the biological hierarchy or the concept of levels of organization. It's the way we orient ourselves in science very often. Our departments are divided on the basis of the study of these different levels. Journals are dedicated to the study of the phenomena at various levels here. And in the philosophical sense, this hierarchy is thought to in some way represent the ontology of nature, the actual structure of empirical nature. So we look at it here to try to determine where we are working and what ecologists study in this hierarchy. You have at the one extreme, atoms, the building blocks of molecules which themselves go into the composition and construction of organelles that build the cells that are the fundamental building blocks of organismal structure. Various cell types constructed into tissues and the tissues themselves assembled into organs, into organ systems that make up an organism. And so once we get to this half of the hierarchy with the organism as a sort of a pivot between these lower levels, these lower and smaller and included levels within the organism, we extend it above the organism to ecological systems, to groups of organisms, and their environments. That is a tree. It's here. It's maybe a maple tree or some kind of maple. It is an individual organism. That is one individual. It's a plant. It's a tree. It's a maple tree. And in our hierarchy, that would constitute an organism. Have a bunch of them together in a small forest. You have a population. If we are speaking of the same species of plant, the same species of maple, this is a population of organisms. We tend to use that term only with reference to members of the same species. But populations do not exist in isolation. They exist as communities of organisms of multiple populations. Not only are there the maples, but there are the ferns. There are other species of tree. There are mice and deer in the system, birds overhead, microbes in the soil, earthworms. This is a community of many populations, many species, coexisting in a single locale. Your emphasis might be not just the biological community, that system, but the interacting biological and abiotic system. I'll just have to avoid writing on the board today for want of time. This interacting community and abiotic system is what people call an ecosystem, or a landscape, or a seascape. This interacting biological and physical system often taken at this scale, at a large scale. And scale it up further, and you have the whole earth. You have the biosphere, or ecosphere. All the world's ecosystems and landscapes put together. That's all fine. I only have one difficulty with this format, really. And it's partly a result of the evolution of our language and our terms, because people use the word ecosystem quite a lot these days to refer to any of these levels. You will hear sometimes about the cellular ecosystem, or your own personal ecosystem, you as an individual, or we could speak of the ecosystem of this classroom. Because all of these biological levels exist in a physical context, you can't separate a biological phenomenon from its abiotic conditions and its abiotic environment. They're inseparable. And in that sense, every biological phenomenon is also an ecological system, or for short, an ecosystem. So just recognize that there are really two uses of that word that are evolving. One, a description of that particular level, above a community, below a landscape, or almost synonymous with a landscape, but certainly below the biosphere, and another more broad definition of ecosystem as a shorthand for ecological system. And when we use it that way in that broad sense, we're perfectly justified in referring to, say, a cellular ecosystem. I won't focus on these, but these are just a couple of textbook examples of how the hierarchy might be presented. Short on time, I'll just deliver those to you on your slides. Looking at this one, we can play a little game. I don't think people can see my laser pointer in the adjoining rooms. What would this be an example of? It's not a great picture example, I wouldn't think, but of our levels, given what else you see here, context, what would this be? It would be a population. It's a family, probably. It's a mother and offspring. But yeah, it's a population. If you can focus on a population at any scale, really, whether it's just four or five individuals, parent and offspring, or all the species of field mouse in that area, that would be the population. That would make this suggest, it would suggest that this is the community, right? Many species of organism, bromeliads, and in a rainforest with their trees and the frogs that are living inside them and the insects that are flitting about and so forth. This would be an ecosystem, because you have water there, I guess, and sky above, representing the abiotic environment and the interaction of the whole community and the abiotic environment. This representing a landscape in this context, a landscape sometimes the term used to refer to multiple ecosystems in their interaction. So be flexible, that's often a hard lesson to learn, actually, in coming into biology, is the definitions in biology and the boundaries are often much more fuzzy than they are in physics or chemistry. And that's the reality of biological phenomenon. They exist very often with fuzzy boundaries. And so you need to be flexible in your definitions. We can't forget the whole earth and its role, right? Getting into ethology abruptly, the science of animal behavior, it really came to form with the work of these three individuals, von Frisch, Lorenz, and Tinbergen, three Europeans working variously in the early and mid and late 1900s who were recognized in the 70s for the contribution that they had made. Not recognized so much during their most active periods of work, but much later with a Nobel Prize for their work in animal behavior. They were credited with having advanced the study of organismal behavior beyond an older and stubborn dichotomy between vitalists and mechanists who really were at loggerheads and struggling to make strong inroads in terms of the experimental and field study of animal behavior. One of the main contributions of these guys was to couch the study of animal behavior in an evolutionary context and in the field, and thus in an ecological context, to ask questions about behavior in the context of evolution and ecology. So a couple of examples of their work, starting with von Frisch and his study of honeybees, European honeybees, and their communication. Now these slides are not, these topics are not part of your reading. They are in your book, so you're welcome to refer to the parts of your book that these cover for additional information, but they're not part of your assigned reading. This is all too interesting just to skip though. What's, I'm not sure what's more amazing that bees actually do this or that this guy discovered this. Really fantastic, the way honeybees communicate knowledge of their environments and specifically their food resources when they get back to the hive. A bee comes back to the hive and it's a big buzz of activity and everyone's huddling around watching this bee dance. Quote unquote. If it does a sort of a round dance like this, it indicates the food is very close by and go, go seek this food, it's very nearby without much additional instruction. But if the bee performs a dance more structured with these semicircles of movement and then this long line where it waggles its abdomen as it moves, it's giving specific information to the viewer about where the food source is in relation to the sun, in relation to the position of the hive itself and something about its distance given the duration of that linear waggle dance. It communicates that to the other bees and off they go. If it waggles long along that linear stretch, the next bee knows to fly quite far and off it goes. Just incredible. Hard one information from very patient observation under a hot sun getting stung in the field. This is the sense in which this is all grounded in basic natural history. Nico Tinberg and research on wasps, following wasps back to their nest, noting that they seem to find the hole that is their nest based on a landmark system and some sort of spatial learning process. So he set up a series of landmarks around pine cones to test this idea, allowed the wasp to orient with those pine cones to come back to the nest but switched it up on the poor little wasp and moved the pine cones away from the nest. Such that when it came back next time, sure it went up to its landmarks, used those and sought the nest inside the ring of pine cones and would do so indefinitely really until it stumbled on the existing nest, the real nest. An insight into how they're using spatial maps to find resources or in this case their shelter. Conrad Lorenz is a beloved figure in biology in many ways in part because of endearing pictures like this from his home where he really had great insights into animal behavior and even human behavior. It was a popularizer and is very well known but these pictures of various waterfowl following him around his property are quite well known. This is the phenomenon of imprinting where an organism goes through a sensitive developmental period early in its life where it's exposed to a certain behavior of another organism or object, usually the parent or some member of the same species that it takes on as a fixed pattern of behavior itself. So it's a mechanism during this sensitive or critical period in development to adopt behaviors from other members of the same species. And in the case of this type of imprinting it's just following around what's judged to be the parent when exposed to an object that's parental enough during this critical period. Need example from your book about how this phenomenon of imprinting is used to assist migration in endangered species of birds today. I'm gonna skip this example entirely. It's a really great example of how of the genetic basis of behavior. So the innate aspects of behavior. I'll focus instead on the innate, rather than on the innate aspects on the learned components. So we've just looked at imprinting and spatial learning in the top and if we're moving clockwise we can see that we can discuss social learning and associative learning and cognitive behavior and cognitive learning. Let's look at an example of social learning from the primates. Something we of course excel at, social learning. We're doing it here. But primates are also excel at this type of learning. So let's see if we can get a video to work. Just an amazing video of this mother chimpanzee in the Central African rainforest. There's a camera set up and it's never been set up before. You'll see her jump because it clicks there. She's not, she knows something's different about this termitary where she's been foraging in previous days because someone set up a little blind with a camera. But she feels comfortable enough that she can go up about her business. She brings a long, heavy stick to puncture the side of the termitary to create access and to incite the workers inside the nest to come out. And then a finer stick that she's brought in her mouth to probe that larger hole to get the workers in the termites to attack it and grab on so that she can then extract those termites to eat them. Her infant meanwhile is hanging around and often in these cases, whether they're cracking nuts or fishing for termites like this, the infant is often or one or two of them is often right on her hips watching very closely what she's doing. They're clearly observing the pattern of behavior and learning from what she's doing. The objects she select to perform the task, the manner in which she goes about the task. This is a type of social learning that's particularly important in mammals and primates and humans. But you see it surprisingly in many organisms. Don't know of any plant examples. A more simple type of learning perhaps, associate of learning. You do something that ends up being uncomfortable or a rat eating bait laced with poison that doesn't kill it but makes it sick. It will be inclined to avoid that odor, that type of bait the next time. Associates the experience with something unpleasant and learns from it. But what about just being clever? Here's a crow with a straight wire trying to get a food object that's on a hook. The wire's straight so it can hardly pick the hooked object up. Well, figure it out. Some organisms can and corvids, crows and ravens so it's bending the wire now into a hook that it can then use to lift the object out. Quite well done because it's smart. I don't have any problem calling that animal clever. It has its own cognition that's flexible with degrees of freedom such that it can perform these kinds of remarkable tasks. We don't, in saying that, we are really not saying anything philosophically about relationship between cognition and behavior or mind and body or anything like that. You can just study this externally with while black boxing the cognition largely. So this whole field of behavioral ecology is what would link the fields of ethology and ecology and we could do more and some of you hopefully will do more and make contributions to just forming that bridge between ethology and ecology. It's really a ripe for development. And I'll just hint here at the evolution of these behaviors. But this will make a lot more sense to you after you have studied evolution itself in the second module. So carry that slide across the semester. We'll get back to it. In this evolutionary context, evolution by natural selection is thought to have made efficient many of these behaviors. Indeed, some speak of optimizing these behaviors for their activities, reducing the costs and maximizing the benefits. We, you will see something like that in one of your labs in a couple of weeks. You'll see a bit of this in action. But here's an example of an optimal foraging, a study in optimal foraging with crows and a type of sea snail, a welk. It's an example from your book. And let me just briefly review it here and you can look in the book for the details. Basically, these crows carry this, they're very hard-shelled snail up to a certain height and drop it on a hard surface to crack it because they can't crack it with their own beaks. They're not strong enough. If you go to the Berkeley marina, you can see gulls doing this. They'll pick muscles up, carry them to a height, drop them on the pavement and eat them. You can just see it right down the street here. These crows do it and the investigators were interested in whether they have a particular height that they prefer to drop these things from because as you might imagine, it's a trade-off between how high you want to fly and how many times you have to make that flight because if you just carry one of these snails up a meter and drop it, it's not gonna break. If you carry it to 30 meters and drop it, it's very likely to break but it takes a lot of energy to fly to 30 meters but it might be worth it if your snail is so nutritious. So you can see how there are trade-offs in this process and I'll let you review the slide to look at the data that's presented. Basically, the investigators found that the most efficient height, based on their experiments of dropping these snails, the most efficient height to drop them from where you reduce the energy expended and the likelihood of breakage and maximize the likelihood of breakage is around five meters and measured in the field, the crows themselves averaged something similar in the height from which they dropped the snails supporting a notion of their behavior having been quote-unquote optimized in some sense and I'll let you think about whether evolution has done that. Is that via evolution by natural selection that that behavior has been optimized or is this the crow cognitively realizing that better height to drop things from during its own lifetime? Open questions. Having blazed through these, I will actually finish in time here. I really only have one more section to cover and hopefully, well, we know the problem now in the technology issue here so it won't happen again. Organisms are members of populations you can't just have an isolated organism outside of its population context for the types of organisms we're talking about because they need to reproduce with other organisms. Some organisms not only exist in populations but they live closely with one another in highly interactive societies, social groups. So let's think a little bit about why, about the costs and benefits of social living, of group living. We excel at this, of course, in our cities and classrooms. We do quite well, we do pretty well as a bunch of little prairie dogs getting along well enough together in tight groups like this. Pigeons, you go out to town and you'll see this. Why are pigeons doing this? Give me a couple of reasons of why you might see a scene like this. We're all in here together because you guys need credits and you've got to graduate and we all have to be in the same place. Why are the pigeons doing this? Safety, yeah, maybe there is safety in being part of a big group. If it were just one pigeon out by itself, it could get harassed to the point of dying by a hawk or something like that. Whereas if it's a part of a big group, maybe individually, each is less vulnerable. Possible, what else? Why might they all be together here? Yes, chance of finding a mate. Yeah, if you're a bunch of orangutans spread about a forest living solidarily, you might have a hard time finding a mate unless you congeal into a more localized region. And same for birds or any other organisms. It might just be easier to find a mate when reproductive season comes around. What else? Yeah. More likely to find food or maybe there is just a great patch of food right here. So perhaps environmental resources have led this group to exist here. So not any real social dynamic itself but the existence of this resource. There's another side of it that I'll highlight in a minute that may be more what you're talking about about in terms of finding food. Anything else that I should consider as a reason why these guys might be together? Can look at a couple more examples. Well for one thing on the right are schooling fish and sharks moving through these schools of fish. That gives you a sense of that safety and numbers idea probably, right? If you're a schooling fish and you're a little fishy out by yourself you're not gonna survive the attack of the big shark. But if you're in this massive school the likelihood of you getting nailed is less because you have so many of your neighbors around you. The old saying about when you encounter a grizzly bear with your friend in the forest, right? What should you do? Well run faster than your friend. So the image on the left shows some data about flocking pigeons and the distance with which they perceive a predator in relation to the size of the flock. That's something like what is sometimes called the many eyes hypothesis for flocking. By being in a big group you have more eyes. You have more perceptual, you have a greater perceptual range for perceiving threats as you multiply your sensory devices. Penguins have become very popular in recent years if they weren't always popular based on a couple of big films, right? Why are these penguins hanging out together? The reproductive aspect, yeah probably that one too. But what else? Warm. Thermoregulation, the basic physiological benefit of huddling in such a bitterly cold environment. They, by maintaining close contact, keep their temperatures up, right? Let's think of at least one negative example of, well I've dropped a negative example here among some positives. Disease and the spread of pathogens is a major corollary of group living in many organisms. The greater the densities, the more rapid and likely the spread of pathogens and disease. It's true in human societies in many cases too, right? Birds, feather mites are a big problem for birds. Mites that actually nibble and eat the feathers, feather tissue, and birds that live in larger colonies may experience infestations of such mites by close group living. These guys you can see more and more around California. It's the largest bird in California except maybe the condor or something like that. I saw a flock over Berkeley last weekend. A flock of white pelicans. When you see them in Berkeley, they're gonna be way overhead flying from who knows where, Point Reyes to the Valley or something. But you do see them around more and more and they're just fabulous when you see them in their own ecosystems because they'll group forage. They'll form a phalanx like this one on the bottom and herd fish into the shallows where they can then scoop them up more easily because they just are dipping their big bills and heads under the water to scoop these fish. So they need to herd them together in order to make that possible. Another example and a very pleasant image to leave you with of group foraging that enables relatively small organisms to capture very nutritious loads of food when working together. Sorry for the technical difficulties. We'll see you Wednesday. My office hours are going to be every day after lecture. You can see the office hours listed on the website, but basically I'm here an hour after every lecture to talk about whatever.