BIO345 Exam 2 Study Guide: Module 4 Life History

You should know and understand the following:

 Lecture Video in Canvas: Sociality

1. Define cooperation: is an outcome of some interaction in which two
individuals each receive a net benefit from their joint actions; May pay
immediate cost for action, but the overall effect on its fitness, IF cooperation is
achieved, is positive.
2. What are some reasons natural selection shouldn’t/should favor
cooperation? The 3 major reasons why natural selections favor cooperation
are: Kinship, Reciprocity and Group Selection.
3. Define altruism: is where you basically have a cost to the behavior and you
aren’t doing as well and you are benefitting someone else. Altruistic behavior
you are kind of going out of your way to maybe be harmed a little bit but you
are doing it to save someone else and benefit them. (it doesn’t sound right
with natural selection but it can happen)
4. What are two ways you can pass your alleles on to the next generation?
One way is if you reproduce, and your offspring are viable, and they are fertile
and everything, then you are passing on those alleles to the next generations.
Another way to pass your alleles without reproducing/indirectly is through
your relatives and your kinship reproducing themselves (relating to inclusive
fitness)
5. Define direct fitness, indirect fitness, and inclusive fitness:
Direct Fitness: when we reproduce, and we pass our alleles onto our offspring
and then they reproduce and so on
Indirect Fitness: even if you don’t have children but you have brothers and
sisters, for example, who do have offspring, some of those that you share
with your brothers and sisters do get passed to their offspring
Inclusive Fitness: is a combination of two things: Direct fitness and indirect
fitness
6. Explain how to calculate the coefficient of relatedness (r):
 Find the most recent common ancestor for A and B
 For this MRCA, calculate the probability that a given allele copy
was passed on to both A and B
 Because of meiosis, this is 50% or 0.5 per generation
 For k meiotic divisions – r = 0.5k

7. What is the coefficient of relatedness for the two people marked with an
asterisk (*) from pedigree 1:
  Answer: meiotic events = 4, shared ancestors = 1, so 0.5 4 = 0.0625 = r.

8. What is the coefficient of relatedness for the two people marked with an
asterisk (*) from pedigree 2:

 Answer: meiotic events = 4, shared ancestors = 2, so 0.5 4=0.0625x2 =

0.125

9. Give the equation for Hamilton’s rule and explain how it works:
10. You don’t want kids but you do want your genes passed on to the next
generation. How many full cousins would you have to set up with their future
spouses to have a higher inclusive fitness than if you had children yourself?
o Answer: (see the second pedigree above for the r value) relatedness to
full cousin is r = 0.125, and 0.125 x 8 cousins = 1. Since your
relatedness to yourself is 1, and your relatedness to 8 cousins is 1, you
would have to set up 9 cousins (indirect fitness = 1.125) for it to be
more beneficial for you to help your cousins than have children
 yourself – this is assuming they all have kids. In this scenario, your
direct fitness is 0 if you don’t have kids, and your indirect fitness is
1.125 if all of your cousins do have kids, so your inclusive fitness would
be 0 + 1.125

11. Why do ground squirrels make dangerous alarm calls? Because of

indirect fitness, the females stay in the population unlike the males, so the
females have many more relatives which they make the alarm calls to help
their family not get attacked by predators, higher r value makes them more
likely to use alarm calls. The males leave the population, thus having less
relatives, a lower r value, they are less likely and we would expect them to not
make the alarm calls at all for their indirect fitness in order to avoid being
attacked by predators.
12. Can your mom love you too much? Decisions are made by how much energy the
parent has available and by how many offspring the parent is likely to have in the
future
At one end, a parent could use every bit of energy to provide one offspring with
everything.
Putting all your eggs in one basket aren’t good for fitness, if you were a only child
they put all of their energy into just you. Parents should have more offspring which
the r value gets bigger, and have more fitness by getting the resources from the
parents (as much as they can) which creates a conflict. If they have more offspring
they can survive more and having better fitness and they can split their love instead
of investing everything into one, better to have others, so to speak.

 4.1 The Lone Wolf Dies But the Pack Survives

13. Define the following and label them as cooperation or conflict:
 Mutualistic: If the fitness of both individuals increases it is mutualistic.
Cooperation
 Altruistic: if the actor suffers but the recipient benefits. Cooperation
 Selfish: If the actor’s fitness increases but the recipient’s is harmed,
then the action is selfish. Cooperation
 Spiteful: If both individuals are harmed. Conflict
 Group selection: Because selfish cheater genotypes are expected to increase within
populations, a trait that benefits the group would have to evolve by selection among
groups, rather than by selection among individual organisms within the groups. Such
group selection was thought to involve the increased survival of populations of altruistic
individuals, and a high extinction rate of populations of selfish individuals. But
simple group selection of this kind is likely to be uncommon, because it requires a high
rate of population formation and extinction to counteract the strong fitness advantage of
selfish individuals. Evolutionary biologists have discovered a variety of other ways that
evolution causes cooperation to evolve at the expense of pure selfishness[

14. When is it beneficial for unrelated individuals to cooperate? (part 1)

Natural selection favors the evolution of cooperation among unrelated
individuals when the fitness costs of cooperation are equaled or surpassed by
 the direct fitness benefits, that is, an increase in fitness of the individual
performing the behavior. An individual that joins a group can lower its risk of
predation simply by finding safety in numbers. This explains why birds fly in
flocks, fish swim in schools, and ungulates roam in herds.

 4.1 How Could Altruism Ever Evolve: Kin selection

15. Define Kin Selection: The most common way that altruism between
related individuals evolves results from kin selection, a type of selection
based on indirect fitness. An allele that causes an individual to act
altruistically decreases the fitness of the actor, but that act increases the
fitness of others. If they are related to the actor, then more copies of the allele
can be passed to the next generation, and the altruistic behavior can spread
through the population. (This logic is formalized in Hamilton’s rule. It states
that an allele that causes an altruistic behavior will spread if the following
condition is met: rB > C).
16. Add to your notes for Lecture Video in Canvas: Sociality using the terms
and explanations given in this section.

 4.1 Even Unrelated Individuals Can Evolve to Cooperate

17. When is it beneficial for unrelated individuals to cooperate? (part 2)
Cooperation can evolve when one individual provides a fitness benefit to
another, as long as the second individual is likely to return the favor later.
18. Define the following:
 Reciprocity: When one individual provides a fitness benefit to another,
as long as the second individual is likely to return the favor later. It can
evolve if there are repeated interactions between individuals, if
individuals recognize and remember each other, and if the benefit
received is great enough to outweigh the cost of providing the benefit
to others.
 Game theory: was introduced by the famous evolutionary biologist
John Maynard Smith introduced Game Theory from economics to the
study of the evolution of social behaviors. Some situations that occur in
humans and other animals are described by the “prisoner’s dilemma”.
Here each two individuals will do best by acting selfishly, but if both
individuals act selfishly, they will do worse than if they both cooperate.
 Evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS): this is a behavior (or “strategy”)
with fitness greater than, or at least equal to, that of any other possible
behavior if all individuals in the population behave that way
19. What do game theory models suggest about when selfishness vs.
cooperation is favored? Game theory model show that selfish behavior is
favored if individuals interact only once, but that repeated interactions can
favor cooperative behavior. Thus, reciprocity can be favored when the
association between the individuals is so long-lasting that the benefits that
each partner provides to the other feed back to the individual’s own benefit.
20. Explain the purpose of punishment: Mathematical models also show that,
under some conditions, cooperation is enhanced if one of the partners in an
 interaction punishes selfish individuals: punishment alters the ratio of benefit
to cost. The punishing partner may impose “sanctions”, terminating the
relationship by withholding benefits from the other partner.

 4.1 Cheating and Spite

21. Explain when cooperation may be favored or selected against, based on
the Pseudomonas experiment: Even bacteria can cooperate. Pseudomonas
aeruginosa requires iron, which it takes up from its environment by the
binding iron atoms with proteins called sideophores produced by others, and
they avoid paying the cost of producing siderophores themselves. The
outcome of competition between genotypes that excrete siderophores
(cooperators) and genotypes that do not (cheaters) depend on the
environment they grow in.
22. Explain green beard genes: Another pathway of altruism is by the “green
beard” effect, which occurs when a single gene codes for a phenotypic trait
that enables its carrier to recognize and help other individuals with the same
trait (for example: a green beard). This situation is uncommon in nature, but a
few cases have been described. One comes from the slime mold.
23. Explain spite: A behavior is spiteful if it harms both the actor and the
recipient. Spite is the antithesis of altruism, but inclusive fitness theory
predicts that spiteful traits can evolve. The conditions needed are that the
actor be less closely related to the recipient than to an average member of
the population, and that harming the recipient enhance the fitness of other
individuals in the population that are more closely related to the actor.

 4.1 Sometimes the Evolution of Cooperation Can Be So Extreme as to Evolve

Sterile Individuals
24. Define eusocial: The most extreme altruism comes from eusocial animals.
These are species in which some individuals do not reproduce much or at all
themselves, and instead rear the offspring of others, usually their parents.
The most familiar examples are found among the ants, bees, wasps, mole-
rats, termites etc.
25. What condition is necessary for natural selection to favor sterile (non-
reproductive) individuals?  In the eusocial species, reproductive females are called queens,
and most of their eggs develop into workers, which are the non reproductive females that
maintain the colony.
26. Explain policing behavior:  Queens of many species therefore destroy their workers’
eggs, and in some species (including honeybees, Apis mellifera) workers destroy the eggs of other
workers[12, 14]. This is one of the best examples of policing of non cooperators in social species, and it
illustrates that kin selection can underlie the evolution not only of altruism, but also of selfishness.

 4.2 Sometimes You Have to Compete

27. Define symbiosis/endosymbiont:
28. Define coevolution:
29. Explain the following:
 Escape-and-radiate coevolution:
 Ecological character displacement:
  Ecological release
 Interference competition

 4.2 Often it is Better to Cooperate than to Compete

30. How is altruism different from mutualism?
31. How do mutualisms form and how are they maintained?

 4.2 Nature Red in Tooth and Claw

32. What are some examples of interactions between enemies/victims?
33. The Red Queen Hypothesis comes up again here. How does it relate to
this enemy/victim dynamics?
34. Explain an evolutionary arms race and its possible outcomes:
35. Explain escalations and oscillations:
36. Define the following:
 Aposematic
 Batesian mimicry
 Müllerian mimicry
 Plant secondary compounds
37. How does escape-and-radiate apply to herbivores and plants?

 4.2 Parasites Drive a Lot of Evolution

38. Define the following:
 Vertical transmission
 Horizontal transmission
 Virulent
39. Briefly and very generally compare and contrast gene-for-gene and
matching allele models.
40. Explain the daphnia “resurrection study”:
41. Explain the Daphnia magna study:
42. How does genetic diversity relate to pathogen resistance?

 4.3 How to Fit In

43. Define the following:
 Life history traits
 Ecological niche
44. How does reproductive effort relate to the cost of reproduction?
45. Why would there be trade-offs between survival and reproduction?
46. How do traits like lifespan, reproductive age, and number of offspring
interact?
47. Define the following:
 Semelparous
 Iteroparous
48. Be able to interpret a life table and know what the following terms
indicate:
 x
 lx
  mx
 lxmx
 R
 r
 What information can a life table provide you with?
49. How does R help you evaluate fitness?

 4.3 Why Do We Evolve to Become Decrepit As We Age?

50. Why do we become decrepit as we age?
51. Why does increasing survival and fecundity at earlier ages have a larger
effect on fitness than at later ages?
52. Explain the two major factors that are responsible for the evolution of
senescence and lifespan:

 4.3 Evolution of the Population Growth Rate and Density

53. What life history traits does resource depletion select for?
54. What life history traits does predation select for?
55. Explain the following:
 Traits of an R-selected population
 Traits of a K-selected population
56. What factors make deferred reproduction advantageous?
57. Explain the findings of the study on guppies in Trinidad:
58. What factors select for semelparity?
59. What are benefits of iteroparity?
60. Why do humans have such few offspring?
61. How does offspring survival relate to reproduction?
62. When are larger vs. smaller offspring advantageous?
63. When might sequential hermaphroditism be advantageous?

 4.3 Video: Life History Theory

64. While watching this video, add some more notes to the points in the
previous section. It’s a good summary/refresher about the previous section.