Index of Animal & Plant Behavior & Adaptation Essays
The essays on the Sibley Nature Center Website are chock-full of ways that our local animals behave, and of how plants and animals have adapted to our harsh environment. Students can use the index to understand the major concepts of behavior and adaptation. This index is not complete, for it only indexes the “Wild on the Prairie” series of essays.
Students can survey the essays in the “Exploring the Natural World” section of the “Moseying” series that are not indexed here and seek to classify them appropriately as an exercise in understanding the basic concepts.
Index for animal behavior essays
- Ants and butterfly caterpillars – symbiosis
- Pseudoscorpions -- phoresy
- Termites -- modification of environment
- Jerusalem cricket – mass emergence in response to rain
- Springtails – cannabilism
- Snout butterflies – population explosion and migration
- Leeches –hermaphroditic reproduction
- Buffalo – herding behavior
- Prairie dogs – coteries (social structure of colonies)
- Burrowing owls – mimicry of rattlesnake in vocalization by young
- Regurgitation as a means of feeding young
- Pronghorn behavior in response to threat from potential predator
- Play in buffalo, social structure of buffalo
- The last day for starving young skunks
- Gray fox behavior
- Commensalism in pocket gopher burrows, the fossorial (underground dwelling) lifestyle
- Gray fox team hunting
- Relationships between same-sized predators
- Tree squirrel behavior
- Temporary ecosystems – the benefits of one species of plant for birds and insects
- “Taming” a whiptail lizard
- Sandhill crane behavior
- Western Kingbird behavior
- Roadrunner behavior:
- Greattailed grackle behavior
- Hummingbird behavior
- A burrowing owl raises a family
- Behavior stimulated by competition – roadrunner and hawk
- Cassin’s sparrow behavior
- Cactus Wren behavior
- Birds and windows
- Scaled quail behavior
- Animals that recycle dung
- Winter residents – hawks
- What birds do when the snow is falling
Index for plant and animal adaptation essays
- Grass seed – germination adaptations and succession, ants – population increase in response to drought
- Leeches – adaptation to drought
- Buffalo – adaptation to grazing
- Burrowing owls – feather morphology for crepuscular feeding
- Prairie dogs – construction of burrow for airflow
- Seed transportation by animals
- Female pocket gopher physiological change due to pregnancy
- Adaptation of tree squirrels to Midland – accidental transport
- Increase of mesquite as a response to overgrazing, nitrogen fixing by mesquites
- Plant speciation – adaptation to soils
- Moisture decidious – adaptation by wolfberry to drought
- Cryptogamic soils – nitrogen fixing (also use search engine to see photographs of cryptogams)
- Plant adaptations to drought
- Plant alkaloids—defense against herbivory, adaptations of the Solanaceae
- Local morphological changes in toads
- Adaptations of amphibians
- Adaptations of small snakes to environment
- Why geckos can climb glass
- Adaptations to the grassland habitat – Cassin’s Sparrow
- The uses of a bird’s tail
- Temporary pluvial ecosystems
- How animals adapt to trash
- The oak tree ecosystem in the urban forest
- Increasing diversity of flora and fauna as a new ecosystem develops
- Adaptation of plants and animals to fire
- The effects of hailstorms on the environment