Question

Not yet answered Marked out of 10.00 Flag question Geese make nests on the ground and sometimes their eggs fall out of the nest. When this happens, they attempt to roll the eggs back into the nest using their bills. When you steal an egg from a goose, and give it a choice of its own egg or a baseball, the goose ignores its egg and tries to roll the baseball into the nest. Given a choice of a baseball and a softball, the goose chooses the softball, and given the choice between a softball and a soccer ball it chooses the soccer ball. Explain in terms of behavioral mechanisms why the goose tries to roll anything at all. What is the evolutionary process that is responsible for the preference of the goose for the larger object, and how does it work in this instance? 1 A B I P EE

Answer 1

The evolutionary mechanisms develop and get selected in favor of survival and reproduction. The behavior of rolling an egg back has a strong result in the survival of as many eggs as posible, leading to succes in survival and reproduction. But have in mind that such rolling behavior maybe was not specifically developed for eggs, which actually is the case as we can see. Geese developed a behavior to roll back round things into the nest, even when the mechanism is not specific to eggs we have to admit such behavior highly increases eggs survival just because eggs are round things. That's how such mechanism was developed and that's how it is still so succesfull.

Now, why do the geese prefer to roll back larger objects? Well, the larger the egg, the more nutrients were brought to that special goosee embryo, meaning such egg had a high spending and currently has higher survival posibilities compared to those tiny eggs that might just not have as many resources as this one. It is about priority, if many eggs need to be rolled back the geese will recover first the most important eggs (the ones that have the greatest posibilities of ensuring survival), and that is larger eggs. Sum this mechanism to the previous one (lack of ability to distinguish between an eggs and any other round thing while rolling back to the nest) and we will have geese rolling soccer balls back to the nest.