yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Animal behavior and offspring success | Middle school biology | Khan Academy


2m read
·Nov 10, 2024

  • Let's talk a little bit about reproductive success, which is related to the number of surviving offspring that an animal has during its lifetime. An animal that has more surviving offspring has a higher reproductive success.

Now, there's two broad categories of traits or behaviors that might drive reproductive success. One might be behaviors that increase the chances of an animal producing offspring. And we know that most animals that we study, not all, but most, reproduce via sexual reproduction. To do that, they need to mate with an individual of the opposite sex. And that's why you see things like peacocks, where these very elaborate feathers are a way of signaling to members of the opposite sex, the peahens, that this peacock here has favorable traits, is attractive to the peahen, has good health, which signals to the peahen that by reproducing with this peacock, they're more likely to have reproductive success.

They'll have healthier offspring, which are more likely to survive, which are more likely to then go on and reproduce. And then assuming that animals are able to mate and able to reproduce, another behavior that you will see amongst animals that will increase the chances that their offspring will survive, and then be able to reproduce themselves is parental care, or behaviors that protect offspring from predators. You see that throughout the animal kingdom.

Here are some emperor penguins taking care of their young baby penguin. Here is a mother grizzly bear taking care of her bears. And here the parental care might be helping them find food, giving them food, training them, protecting them from other predators or from competitors in some way. And this isn't just amongst bears, and penguins, and potentially peacocks and peahens. It's all in service to, at least in some level, reproductive success.

More Articles

View All
Introduction to experimental design | High school biology | Khan Academy
What we are going to do in this video is talk a little bit about experiments in science. Experiments are really the heart of all scientific progress. If you think about it, let’s just say this represents just baseline knowledge. Then people have hunches i…
The importance of taking a break
What’s up you guys, it’s Graham here. So let’s talk about a topic that seems taboo for a lot of these business motivation mindset channels, and that’s the topic of vacation and taking a break. That’s almost like shunned upon in all of these channels that …
Fight or Die | Edge of the Unknown on Disney+
It’s freaking gnarly, dude. It’s as gnarly as I could have imagined it being. This is a lot of fun. Just really nervous about how fast I’m going to be actually flying off the lip. With drop kayaking, when you’re really pushing yourself is when you feel m…
Gathering Greens | Life Below Zero
You ready, bun? I got to flip over my shoes so they don’t get rained on. The hailstones spend their summer along the Koic River, where they only have a brief window to gather resources before the freeze returns. For Chip and Agnes, teaching their daughter…
You Didn’t Know Mushrooms Could Do All This | National Geographic
There are so many things you can do with fungi, and this is what keeps us up at night. Fungi for food, medicine, textiles, fiber, packaging materials, even biofuel. Fungi just have this potential to unlock biological material that’s a waste product in our…
Katy Perry - Hot N Cold (Official Music Video)
(church bell ringing) Katy, do you take Alexander to be your lawfully wedded husband? I do. Alexander, do you take Katy to be your lawfully wedded wife? (upbeat pop music) ♪ You change your mind ♪ ♪ Like a girl changes clothes ♪ ♪ Yeah, you PMS like a…