Of course, age- or size-specific differences in the relationship between female size and fecundity (Sadovy, 1996) or unequal offspring quality among age or size classes (Berkeley et al., 2004) can mean that aggregate biomass is an inadequate index, but requires accounting for population structure without necessarily considering behavior. Still, the fusion of behavioral ecology with metapopulation ecology remains a largely untapped area of study, and heuristic modeling might reveal that certain behavioral effects are greater than intuition and available data suggest. Our ignorance here points to the importance of answering this question. Generator, Words When this is the case, good quality parents, or parents providing care under benign conditions, may provide more care in absolute terms (i.e., expend more energy or time), yet pay a smaller cost in relative terms (i.e., allocate a smaller proportion of the total resource budget to care). As with other topics in behavioral ecology, interactions within a family involve conflicts. There are two major types of food seeking strategies employed by animals: sit and wait (the kind employed by spiders, rattlesnakes, etc.) Since those early studies, behavioral ecology has become less studied in coral reef fishes. Ecol. This textbook helped to define the field of Behavioural Ecology. However, the fact that male status is the final stage of development and that sex ratios are usually female biased (but see Adams et al., 2000), coupled with greater vulnerability to harvest of the larger bodied males, allows the possibility of sperm limitation. Unfortunately, this practice is problematic because parental expenditure is measured in absolute terms (the amount of energy or time), while parental investment or parental effort should be measured in relative terms (the proportion of the total resource budget that is allocated to parental care). A hypothetical example would be the energy used to produce a call indicating a larger than actual body size – energy that could otherwise have been used to grow a larger body. For example, why do some birds migrate (see migration) while others are resident? By most behavioral definitions, however, the archetypal example of altruism is worker behavior in the social insects, whereby individuals spend their entire life building, guarding, and foraging to raise their relatives’ offspring. In behavioral ecology, altruistic behaviors are those that reduce the lifetime reproduction of an actor and benefit another individual. The field of behavioral ecology emerged when Nikolaas Tinbergen, a Dutch ethologist, outlined four primary causes for behavior. About the journal Bringing together significant work on all aspects of the subject, Behavioral Ecology is broad-based and covers both empirical and theoretical approaches. 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