Canada Goose Retailers Montreal driven by physiological

Imprinting involves the ability to learn a specific essential piece of information at the right stage of development. Openness for learning through imprinting is restricted to a short time span, called a critical period. The most famous example of imprinting comes from Konrad Lorenz and his geese. He found that goslings learn to recognize their mother (and to tell her from other geese) very early in life. Canada Goose Outlet Sale By substituting himself for the mother goose at the right developmental stage, he could get the goslings to imprint on him, and faithfully follow him wherever he went. The openness of goslings for learning a leader, even if it does not resemble a goose, is intriguing. Imprinting demonstrates how genes can largely shape a behavior, but that evolution can create a window for learning important information about variation in the environment (Figure 2).

Figure 2: A Canada goose family.Imprinting by the goslings on their parents helps to keep the family together.2010 Nature Education Courtesy of Michael Breed.Imprinting provides an opportunity to learn key variable components in an environment while retaining largely innate behavioral patterns. Canada Goose Jackets Outlet More flexibility may be shown in the development of food preferences, as food availability can vary from habitat to habitat, or from season to season. Insects may imprint on the chemistry of the leaves they eat as caterpillars; when they become adults they then choose to lay their eggs on plants with a chemistry that matches the leaves they ate when young. This insures a suitable diet for the next generation. Young birds and mammals often learn food preferences based on food shared by adults, on observations of feeding preferences of adults, and on sampling possible food items.

Another form of learning involves aversions, which can develop at any point in any animal life. Birds and mammals develop lifelong aversions to specific foods that contain poisons that cause sickness (such as monarch butterflies). In contrast, some preferences and aversions appear to be innate, or at least to be driven by physiological needs for certain nutrients, such as salt.Many animals learn key information for survival. Cheap Canada Goose Parka Sale These abilities are often very specific to a particular context. A species may be very adept at learning facts that are relevant to its survival, but not be able to employ learning across a broad range of situations that did not occur in its evolutionary history. For example, native birds in Guam were completely unequipped to learn how to evade predation by brown tree snakes, which were introduced into Guam about 1950.

Another good example of this comes from animals that store (or cache) food. Caching is an adaptation to cope with food supplies that are abundant during a short season, such as fruits and the nuts from trees. Some animals cache their food at a central location. Honeybees storing honey exemplify this, and centralized caches can require strong defense against thieves, a notable ability of honeybees. Buy Canada Goose Jackets Alternatively, cached food can be scattered through the habitat; tree squirrels and gray jays are notable for scatter caching (this is sometimes called scatter hoarding) (Steele et al. 2008). Scatter caching of food stands out as a particularly challenging context for learning complex information about locations, and birds and mammals that cache food often display impressive abilities to recall cache locations (Figure 3).
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