Biologist: Cuttlefish rapidly alter their skin patterning to produce disruptive coloration when resting near heterogeneous coral rubble, but switch to uniform background matching when traversing open sand flats. Researchers originally hypothesized that this behavioral switching is driven by energetic efficiency, assuming that maintaining complex disruptive patterns demands substantially more neural computation and muscular tension in chromatophores than uniform matching. However, recent physiological assays demonstrate that maintaining uniform coloration requires just as much metabolic energy and muscular activation as maintaining disruptive patterning. Therefore, the hypothesis that energetic efficiency drives this behavioral switching must be false.
Which of the following are assumptions on which the biologist's argument strictly depends? (Select all that apply.)
- The overall energetic cost of transitioning between coloration states does not create an energetic savings that would make switching advantageous despite identical maintenance costs.Cevap
- BCuttlefish alter their coloration patterns exclusively to avoid visual detection by predators rather than to regulate metabolic expenditure.
- The laboratory assays did not substantially underestimate the wild energetic expenditure required to maintain disruptive patterning relative to uniform coloration.Cevap
- DIf two camouflage patterns require equal metabolic energy, an organism will always alternate between them randomly.
- EDemonstrating that uniform coloration consumes equal metabolic energy is sufficient to prove that the behavior evolved solely for thermoregulatory purposes.