-
Asked by to James on 13 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
Question: have you ever noticed a change in animal behaviour acording to the animals age?
- Keywords:
-
James Bell answered on 13 Jun 2014:
Yes definitely, loads of animals change their behaviour throughout their lives.
In the deep-sea one of the biggest changes is between young and adult life stages. Lots of the animals in the deep-sea don’t move very much, or not at all, as adults (worms, corals, mussels and lots more). This means they have to do all their moving to new places as young animals. These animals have a life stage where they live in the mid-ocean, really far above the seabed and this is how species move from place to place. They float around, usually for a month or so before settling somewhere new. Once they’ve settled, they change into their adult form (like a caterpillar changing into a butterfly or tadpole to frog).
Comments
Catherine commented on :
To add another example – a lot of social insects (insects that live in large colonies like ants, termites and bees) change what jobs they do as they get older. For example, a young honeybee spends most of its time inside the nest looking after the colony’s eggs. However, once it gets old enough it starts flying outside of the nest to look for food in flowers that it brings back to make honey with. That means that it’s really important to have lots of different aged bees inside the colony because each age group has a different role.
Shaylon commented on :
Many social animals change their roles in the group as they get older. Older elephants become teachers for the rest of the group because they’ve learned so much over their long lives.
Other social animals go though a ‘learning to be a grownup’ stage– just like humans. Jays stay with their parents for a year or so and help raise their baby brothers and sisters. They learn adult skills like building nests, feeding babies, and keeping predators away.
Natalie commented on :
These are all great examples of how animals might change their role in a group as they grow up, but I wanted to point out that there are many other ways in which animals change their behaviour as they get older.
For example, throughout their lives, animals gain more experience and learn from that experience. So in some species, older individuals are better at finding food or finding good territories.
Another example is something that I have observed myself in the fish I study and it has to do with which male a female might choose to have babies with. Young females tend to be very picky! They only want to mate with the big, attractive males and they reject smaller males. On the other hand, old females don’t have very strong preferences and often mate with small males.