Behavioral ecology

Behavioral ecology is a broad term that encompasses all theoretical and empirical approaches. It covers the studies of complete range of organisms covering humans, plants, vertebrates and invertebrates. Behavioral ecology can also be defined as a division of ecology that stresses upon escalatory reasons of conduct between several species and populations.

Human behavioral ecology

The main motive behind human behavioral ecology is to decide how social or economical factors influence behavioral discrepancy between and within populations. Behavioral ecology studies the adaptive design of behaviors, traits and life histories in a biological framework. It covers the optimization to the areas of human behaviors and civilizing diversity. While studying on HBM, it is assumed that humans are extremely dynamic in their behaviors.

Factors effecting behavioral ecology

Ultimate causation: - Two major factors that add to ultimate causation are phylogenic restraints that encompass the behavior; other one is adaptive consequence. Phylogenic restraints are chiefly responsible for confining the developments of certain behavioral traits. That is why, birds can fly but mammals cant. Adaptive consequences emphasis on what trait is good for evolutionary perspective.

Proximate causation: - It is also further grouped into two major factors as mechanistic and ontogenetic. Ontogenetic factors involve entire experience all through lifetime from origin to death. Mechanistic factors are basically some processes of body that leads to some behavioral traits like impact of hormones on activities and neuronal basis.

Theory of optimization: - The simplest approach to obtaining an optimal solution is to do cost/ benefit investigation. By examining the cost of a particular behavior with the advantages of behavior, it can be easily considered that if entire costs exceeds to benefits, then a behavior will not develop.

Stable strategies: - The idea of stable strategies plays a vital role in the development of animal's behaviors. One significant fact is that the evolution of behaviors is not only affected by the physical environment, but also is driven by the interaction among other individuals.
Behavioral ecology plays an imperative role in estimating the behaviors of several species included in food chain and also discovers the reasons behind it.