Differential Reproductive Success
Ultimately, behavior is subject to natural selection just as with any other trait. Therefore animals that employ optimal behavioral strategies specific to their environment will generally leave greater numbers of offspring than their suboptimal conspecifics. Animals that leave a greater number of offspring than others of their own species are said to have greater fitness. However, environments change over time. What might be good behavior today might not be the best behavior in 10,000 years time or even 10 years time. The behavior of animals has and will continue to change in response to the environment. Behavioral ecology is one of the best ways to study these changes. As geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky famously wrote, "nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution."
Read more about this topic: Behavioral Ecology
Famous quotes containing the words differential, reproductive and/or success:
“But how is one to make a scientist understand that there is something unalterably deranged about differential calculus, quantum theory, or the obscene and so inanely liturgical ordeals of the precession of the equinoxes.”
—Antonin Artaud (1896–1948)
“The blind conviction that we have to do something about other people’s reproductive behaviour, and that we may have to do it whether they like it or not, derives from the assumption that the world belongs to us, who have so expertly depleted its resources, rather than to them, who have not.”
—Germaine Greer (b. 1939)
“To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)