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Full-Text Articles in Behavior and Ethology
Heat For The Masses: Thermal Ecology Of The Western Tent Caterpillar, Victoria Dahlhoff
Heat For The Masses: Thermal Ecology Of The Western Tent Caterpillar, Victoria Dahlhoff
Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers
A unique feature of some gregarious, colonial insects is their ability to create external structures that alter environmental conditions for the entire (often family) group. A combination of physical alteration of local microhabitats and behavioral thermoregulation allows many of these animals to actively control their body temperatures, which allows them to regulate energy use and metabolism in variable thermal environments. Here I describe mechanisms of microhabitat modification and thermal regulation in the western tent caterpillar, Malacosoma californicum pluviale. Tent caterpillars build communal silk tents, whose temperatures can rise substantially above ambient air temperature. I experimentally manipulated colony sizes and examined …
Glucocorticoids And Parental Effort In Tree Swallows (Tachycineta Bicolor), Mackenzie Prichard
Glucocorticoids And Parental Effort In Tree Swallows (Tachycineta Bicolor), Mackenzie Prichard
Undergraduate Theses, Professional Papers, and Capstone Artifacts
All vertebrates respond to stressful situations through the release of hormones called glucocorticoids (CORT). These hormones alter processes within the body to prioritize long term survival over immediate reproduction. It is hypothesized that this is helps individuals survive until conditions become more favorable for successful reproduction. Historically, stress was hypothesized to primarily to pull organisms out of reproductive life history stages when unfavorable conditions made offspring survival slim (otherwise known as the “CORT-tradeoff hypothesis”). However, recent evidence suggests that birds actively feeding nestlings show elevated CORT levels, possibly due to the increased metabolic demands of parenthood. This relationship has been …