#it was fun researching physiological adaptations to elevation changes

[skyloftian-nutcase]

Skyloft headcanons

I’m a dweeb and I did a bunch of science review on stuff and got this.

1. The cloud barrier is at 10,000ft/3km elevation. I went skydiving at 13,000ft (it was awesome) and it seemed appropriate to put Skyloft at that height, so the area that people can freely fly their loftwings ranges from 10,000--25,000ft, or 3--8km, and Skyloft is around 13,000ft/4km elevation.

2. Typically riders fly up to 20,000ft and only the really experienced ones climb the extra 5k because this area approaches the “Death Zone” - this is the point where you cannot survive here for more than a few hours because of such a lack of oxygen in the air. This is a real thing, it’s at 25,000ft or 8km elevation, and this is the elevation where many hikers die climbing Mt Everest. So it’s a thing in The Sky too.

3. It’s naturally colder the higher you go because the atmosphere is thinner. This is a fact. Technically, this means the people of Skyloft would likely be physiologically adapted to the cold. They would have more brown fat on them, which is fat that is designed to retain heat without creating shivering and energy consumption in the body - so Skyloftians might be a bit stockier, though not looking overweight. Another real adaptation that is possibly noted in humans is an increased metabolic rate. In the context of my headcanon, then, that means Skyloftians are stockier and eat way more than the average Hylian.

4. There are seasons in The Sky since the earth’s rotation still affects them. They’re called Cold Season and Warm Season. Because they need to be able to survive off the vegetation and water, Hylia blessed the sky islands to remain within a certain temperature range rather than plummet into freezing temps in the Cold Season. The average Skyloft temperature is 40-65 F or 4-18 C.

5. They’re too high for rain, unless you count the thunder cloud, so on the Surface when it rains they don’t have a word for it. They call rain “tears from the sky.�� Instead of saying “it’s raining,” Link would say “the sky is crying.” It was extremely alarming the first time it happened during his journey.

6. At their elevation, Skyloft is exposed to more sunlight (less protection from the atmosphere and clouds). As such, they produce more melanin and all have a good tan. Also, the air is dryer up there, so their skin is naturally oilier than a Hylian.

7. Thinner atmosphere = less oxygen. As such, these guys adapted just like anyone who lives at a higher elevation: they produce more hemoglobin in their blood to capture as much oxygen as possible to make up for everything their body needs, especially if they’re running at a higher basic metabolic rate due to cold adaptation. When Link and Zelda go to the Surface, then, they have more hemoglobin than they need, which means their body absorbs more oxygen than it needs, which means they get this lovely syndrome called hyperoxia, or oxygen toxicity. Signs and symptoms include headache, dizziness, confusion, coughing, seizures, and eventual death if untreated. Impa had to help Zelda adjust, which she did quickly when she noticed Zelda was ill the first day or two. Link, however, being in a hurry, did not notice when he started having headaches, didn’t think twice when he’d have coughing fits, until he collapsed into a full on seizure in the sacred spring at the Forest Temple and Fi had to get him out of there. Since then, Zelda and Link christened it Surface Sickness, and the way they and everyone else handles it is by taking it easy their first day or two on the Surface with occasional flights to higher elevations to help their bodies adapt. Eventually the body realizes it doesn’t need all this hemoglobin that it produced and it adjusts accordingly.

8. Skyloftians naturally adapt to higher elevations like Skyloft far faster than they adapt to the Surface. If Link and Zelda visit Skyloft for a day, they get Surface Sickness when they go back to their settlement even though they spend more time on the Surface as a general rule than in Skyloft post-adventure.

[fatehbaz]

neotropical oaks?

Yea, disappointing that the map that the Savanna Oak Foundation uses to display oak savanna distribution in North America doesn’t include the tropical/Mesoamerican oak landscapes. That organization tries to explicitly distinguish between oak savanna and oak woodland, but the exclusion is still not-fun since Mesoamerica is famously the site of the highest biodiversity of oak species. And some fresh, new research (declared “the most comprehensive ever”) from July 2020 looked into the biodiversity of neotropical oak.

Oak savanna/woodland discussion seems to be ubiquitous in both formal research and “citizen science” in the Midwest and Great Lakes. And oak discussion also seems ubiquitous in California, obviously, with the oak being a central character in so-called Mediterranean California ecology. But highest local oak biodiversity is in Mexico and Central America.

The map does display northern Mexican oak savanna in the Sky Islands and northern Sierra Madre Occidental, I guess. I’m a big fan of the Sky Islands because it hosts some of the world’s most dramatic altitudinal zonation (extreme transitions between desert valley floors and moist forested high-elevation slopes) and the ecoregion provides a habitat corridor for neotropical species like jaguar, ocelot, and Boa constrictor (all more associated with South America in popular consciousness) to extend their distribution towards and very close to (and sometimes, into) the US border.

But oak plays another role in why I’m such a fan of the region. Because the pine-oak woodland of the Sky Islands and northern Sierra Madre Occidental is/was the home of two superlative species of birds endemic only to the Sky Islands, the imperial woodpecker (world’s largest woodpecker until extinction in 20th century) and the still-extant thick-billed parrot (famous for being the only parrot to live in the US, in Arizona/New Mexico, after the extinction of Carolina parakeet), which I like to call the “pine-cone parrot” because of its love for dismantling and eating pine cones.

(Fun aside: Imperial woodpecker, endemic to pine-oak of Sierra Madre Occidental, had its closest relative in the more-famous icon of extinction, the ivory-billed woodpecker of forested eastern US. And pine-cone parrot, endemic to pine-oak Sierra Madre Occidental, had its closest relative in the more-famous icon of extinction, the Carolina parakeet of forested eastern US.)

And the Sky Islands and Madrean Archipelago aren’t even “wet” environments (they’re surrounded and infiltrated by true deserts) and they aren’t even fully tropical. And so altitudinal zonation in tropical mountains is famous for its effects on biodiversity. (As in the Andes, where you have ice caps existing at the planet’s equator, glaciers, alpine meadows, and tropical rainforests sitting close together.) And apparently that same effect, altitudinal zonation, which gives the Sky Islands such biodiversity, might also be responsible for the high oak biodiversity in southern Mexico and tropical Mesoamerica, too? At least, according to this new stuff I read today.

This research published in the “August” 2020 (really, July 2020) edition of Scientific American is being celebrated as the “definitive” and “most comprehensive” genetic and biogeographic study of oak yet. Don’t know if that’s true because I’m horrible with technical stuff (chemistry; physics; physiology; microbiology). But as a biogegraphy fan, I liked that a lot of the article focused on the history of the distribution range of oak, and specifically addressed how Mexico/Mesoamerica came to have such biodiversity. (Reading this article today is what actually compelled me to think about oak and share the map today.)

Sorry in advance, these are all hazy screenshots from my older posts:

The Savanna Oak Foundation map of oak savanna:

Distribution of extant oak:

Altitudinal zonation of Sky Islands and Sierra Madre Occidental, which contributes to the biodiversity:

Biodiversity of Sky Islands:

Local distribution of jaguar:

Pine-cone parrot:

Imperial woodpecker:

Endemic and endangered bird species in the Sky Islands and northern Sierra Madre Occidental:

The distribution range of both the imperial woodpecker and the pine-cone parrot are pretty much confined to exactly this ecoregion depicted on the map, with a few transient outliers.

Anyway, here’s the excerpt from the 2020 “comprehensive” research on origin and geography of oak diversity:

As temperatures cooled worldwide, the North American climate also became more seasonal. [...] Oak pollen and leaf impressions became more common in the North American fossil record 35 million years ago, by which time decreased temperatures and increased seasonality had converted North America north of Mexico from a mostly tropical to a mostly temperate continental landscape. As climate change extirpated tropical forests from North America, ecological opportunity arose for the oaks. [...] From eastern North America, perhaps by way of Texas, the red and white oaks then moved into Mexico between 10 million and 20 million years ago. In all these areas, palms and broad-leaved evergreen trees had been pushed south [...]. The resulting abundance of open habitat enabled oaks to diversify. Increased ecological opportunity allowed oaks to undergo an adaptive radiation [...]. This adaptive radiation played out most dramatically in Mexico and Central America, where about 40 percent of all the world's oaks reside. Recall that oaks were a largely cold-adapted lineage that spread across the continent as temperatures dropped and seasonality increased. As they migrated south into Mexico, oaks climbed to higher elevations that more closely resembled the temperate biome in which they had evolved, and they encountered high topographic variation that readily separated them into reproductively isolated populations. Oaks also evolved more rapidly along the continuum from low water availability to high water availability as they moved into Mexico. [...] Thus, the reason for the high oak diversity in Mexico appears not to be warmer temperatures. And because Mexican oaks are relatively young, their high diversity has not accrued over comparatively long periods of evolutionary time. Rather adaptive radiation led to higher speciation rates in these evolutionarily young Mexican oaks as they moved into the mountains.

From: Andrew L. Hipp, Paul S. Manos, and Jeannine Cavender-Bares: “How Oak Trees Evolved to Rule the Forests of the Northern Hemisphere.” Scientific American. July/August 2020.

So oak in neotropical Mesoamerica: Altitudinal zonation is important?

Sad news:

[richard1lauritsen-blog]

Test Bank Learning and Behavior Active Learning 6th Edition

For Order This And Any Other Test

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 Contact us At: johnmate1122@gmail.com

 Chapter 1--Introduction: Learning to Change

Student: ___________________________________________________________________________

1. The author of your text evidently believes that ____.  A. change is a good thing B. behavior is best accounted for by nature C. adaptation occurs slowly D. learning is a way of adapting to change

 2. Variation and natural selection are the foundations of ____.  A. genetics B. evolution C. learning D. adaptation

 3. Darwin's theory of evolution has been around for about ____.  A. 50 years B. 75 years C. 150 years D. 200 years

 4. Chapter 1 includes a box called The Face of Change. One point the essay makes is that ____.  A. many changes in our lives are imperceptible B. change means progress C. faces are recognizable even though they change D. learning means changing

 5. The role of natural selection in the beaks of finches was the subject of research by ____.  A. Peter and Rosemary Grant B. Harry and Margaret Harlow C. Lee Cronk D. Richard Dawkins

 6. The gollypod, a fictitious aquatic animal, breaks out in a cold sweat whenever exposed to the sun. This reaction is most likely ____.  A. a reflex B. a fixed action pattern C. a general behavior trait D. the result of learning

 7. Teenagerus Americanus, a two-legged ape indigenous to North America, breaks out in a cold sweat whenever exposed to elevator music. This reaction is most likely ____.  A. a reflex B. a fixed action pattern C. a general behavior trait D. learned behavior

 8. The tendency of some animals to hoard food is probably an example of ____.  A. a reflex B. a fixed action pattern C. a general behavior trait D. learned behavior

 9. The quotation, "Change is the only constant," is attributed to ____.  A. Buckminster Fuller B. Virgil C. Lucretius D. Einstein

 10. Modal action patterns are induced by events called ____.  A. genes B. stimuli C. releasers D. reflexes

 11. The chief advantage of learning over natural selection as a means of adapting to change is that learning ____.  A. is faster B. is more enduring C. is less enduring D. does not affect all members of a species

 12. The experiments of Harlow and Harlow demonstrated that how monkeys are reared ____.  A. has little effect on their behavior later in life B. can have a profound effect on their behavior later in life C. has no effect on adult sexual activity D. can improve their mental health

 13. The phenomenon that is nearly the opposite of habituation is ____.  A. dehabituation B. inhabituation C. stabilization D. sensitization

 14. The person who demonstrated that the marching of tropical army ants is not intelligent behavior is ____.  A. Schneirla B. Schneider C. Schneidman D. Schneirman

 15. The list of alleged human fixed action patterns ____.  A. has gotten shorter in recent years B. has gotten longer in recent years C. has remained about the same over the years D. is longer for pre-industrialized peoples than for those living in industrialized nations

 16. One person who raised doubts about the incest taboo is ____.  A. Grant B. Freud C. Wilson D. McDougall

 17. In her study of baboons, Shirley Strum found that the most successful males were ____.  A. offspring of dominant females B. bigger than other males C. less aggressive than other males D. the youngest

 18. The brown-headed cowbird deposits its eggs in the nests of other birds. This is most likely a ____.  A. reflex B. modal action pattern C. general behavior trait D. learned behavior

 19. Natural selection is often ____.  A. ahead of the times B. behind the times C. up with the times D. under the times

 20. Learning is an evolved ____.  A. selectivity B. modifiability C. biology D. karma

 21. According to David Buss, the work of Gregor Mendel ____.  A. required mathematical skills Darwin lacked B. had little or no influence on Darwin's thinking C. is irrelevant to evolution D. was done 40 years after Darwin's death

 22. Behavior is anything an animal or person does that can be ____.  A. seen B. described C. attributed to physical events D. measured

 23. Natural selection is illustrated by changes in the coloration of the Peppered Moth resulting from ____.  A. industrial pollution B. drought C. loss of habitat D. long term changes in the hydraulic cycle

 24. Most mutations ____.  A. are not helpful to survival B. contribute to survival in important ways C. cause monsterism D. occur in one-celled organisms

 25. Keltner and Anderson suggest that ____ may protect us from injury by appeasing others we have offended.  A. crying B. sighing C. yawning D. blushing

 26. A reflex is ____.  A. any very simple behavior B. a simple response to a simple event C. a relationship between an event and a simple response D. a purely physiological phenomenon

 27. There is evidence that the rate of ____ in fetuses is correlated with intellectual development after birth.  A. mutagenesis B. sensitization C. habituation D. FAPs

 28. The rooting of pigs (for worms, larvae, and truffles) is an example of a  A. MAP B. reflex C. general behavior trait D. learned behavior

 29. The color ____ is a releaser for aggression in the male stickleback.  A. green B. blue C. yellow D. red

 30. Learning is  A. a change in behavior. B. an improvement in performance. C. the acquisition of new behavior. D. a cognitive change that may be reflected in changes in behavior.

 31. Experience refers to ____.  A. mental states B. our surroundings C. events that affect behavior D. things we live through

 32. An ____ is something an organism tries to escape or avoid.  A. aversive B. adversive C. adhesive D. adenoid

 33. The figure below most likely illustrates ____.   A. habituation B. sensitization C. a FAP D. insurgence

 34. The best title for the figure below is ____.   A. diet and heredity B. fearfulness and heredity C. addiction and heredity D. aggressiveness and heredity

 35. In the fox-breeding experiment, researchers selectively mated foxes that displayed ____ behavior.  A. aggressive B. intelligent C. dog-like D. habituated

 36. Lee Cronk wrote an article on how evolved behavior can prove nonadaptive when the environment changes. The article was called ____.  A. Old Dogs, Old Tricks B. The Once and Future King C. Murder Most Fowl D. History Recalled

 37. ____ poked fun at the human tendency to see itself as the crowning achievement of evolution.  A. Charles Darwin B. Gregor Mendel C. Bertrand Russell D. Alexander Pope

 38. Zing Yang Kuo found that 86% of kittens that saw their mothers kill rats later killed rats themselves. He also found that ____ of kittens that never saw their mothers kill rats later killed rats themselves.  A. 87% B. 73% C. 65% D. 45%

 39. Hart and Risley did a longitudinal study of the influence of the home verbal environment on children from different socioeconomic backgrounds. They found that ____.  A. children whose parents talked to them a lot later scored lower on IQ tests B. children whose parents talked to them a lot later scored higher on IQ tests C. the amount of parental talk was unrelated to later IQ scores D. the influence of parental language depended on parental income.

 40. ____ refers to modal action patterns as complex reflexes.  A. Gregor Mendel B. Charles Darwin C. Zing Yang Kuo D. Howard Rachlin

 41. Steven says that he was very nervous when he first attended college classes, but now he feels quite relaxed. Steven's loss of anxiety is most likely an example of ____.  A. learning B. disease C. maturation D. fatigue

 42. Your text defines behavior as anything an organism does that can be ____.  A. measured B. tested C. inferred D. accounted for

 43. A thumbtack stuck in a bulletin board several feet away is less likely to affect your behavior than a thumbtack placed on the chair on which you are sitting. Even though both examples involve a thumbtack, the second is more likely to qualify as a ____.  A. stimulus B. contiguous relation C. contingency D. response

 44. Natural selection helps the individual adapt to changes in its environment.  True    False

 45. Reflexes are generally less variable than modal action patterns.  True    False

 46. All reflexes contribute to survival.  True    False

 47. Darwin believed that there were no human instincts.  True    False

 48. Research on the sexual orientation of sisters of lesbian women demonstrated that homosexuality is an inherited characteristic.  True    False

 49. A major problem with natural selection as an adaptive mechanism is that it is slow.  True    False

 50. Natural selection helps the species to adapt to change, not the individual.  True    False

 51. The evolution of most species is now complete.  True    False

 52. Probably the reason the world seems relatively stable is that we don't live long enough to see many drastic changes.  True    False

 53. As far as the study of learning is concerned, experience refers primarily to events that take place inside the person.  True    False

 54. Your text views learning as a change in the brain that is represented in behavior.  True    False

 55. Learning always involves the acquisition of new behaviors.  True    False

 56. It is sometimes difficult to say whether an event is behavior or physiology.  True    False

 57. The word stimulus always refers to events in an organisms surroundings.  True    False

 58. Darwin founded his theory of evolution on the work of Gregor Mendel.  True    False

 59. Repeated exposure to a stimulus that evokes a reflex response results in ____________________.  ________________________________________

 60. The dispute over the relative importance of genetics and learning is often called the ____________________ debate.  ________________________________________

 61. The chief limitation of natural selection as a means of adapting to change is that ____________________.  ________________________________________

 62. ____________________, like natural selection, is a biological mechanism for adapting to change.  ________________________________________

 63. Learning is a/an __________________ in __________________ due to __________________.  ________________________________________

 64. A stimulus is an environmental event that is capable of affecting ____________________.  ________________________________________

 65. The brown-headed cowbird puts its eggs in other birds' nests. This is an example of a/an ____________________.  ________________________________________

 66. Explain the role of mutations in evolution. 

        67. Why is natural selection helpful to species, but not to individuals?