Behavioral ecology, also spelled behavioural ecology, is the study of the evolutionary basis for animal behavior due to ecological pressures. Behavioral ecology emerged from ethology after Niko Tinbergen outlined four questions to address when studying animal behaviors that are the proximate causes, ontogeny, survival value, and phylogeny of behavior. The journal publishes reviews, original contributions and commentaries dealing with quantitative empirical and theoretical studies in the analysis of animal behavior at the level of the individual, group, population, community, and species. The section "Methods" considers submissions concerning statistical procedures and their problems, as well as with problems related to measurement techniques.Special emphasis is placed on ultimate functions and evolution of ecological adaptations of behavior, in addition to mechanistic studies of proximate cause. Among aspects of particular interest are intraspecific behavioral interactions, with special focus on social behavior including altruism, cooperation and parental care;  If an organism has a trait that provides a selective advantage (i.e., has adaptive significance) in its environment, then natural selection favors it. Adaptive significance refers to the expression of a trait that affects fitness, measured by an individual's reproductive success. Adaptive traits are those that produce more copies of the individual's genes in future generations. The value of a social behavior depends in part on the social behavior of an animal's neighbors. For example, the more likely a rival male is to back down from a threat, the more value a male gets out of making the threat. The more likely, however, that a rival will attack if threatened, the less useful it is to threaten other males. When a population exhibits a number of interacting social behaviors such as this, it can evolve a stable pattern of behaviors known as an evolutionarily stable strategy. This term, derived from economic game theory, became prominent after John Maynard Smith  recognized the possible application of the concept of a Nash equilibrium to model the evolution of behavioral strategies. Maladaptive traits are those that leave fewer. For example, if a bird that can call more loudly attracts more mates, then a loud call is an adaptive trait for that species because a louder bird mates more frequently than less loud birds thus sending more loud-calling genes into future generations.pre- and postzygotic sexual selection; skin recognition and kin selection, group structure, social networks; interspecific behavioral interactions including competition, resource partitioning, speciation, foraging, mutualism, predator-prey interactions and parasitism; signalling, behavioral ecophysiology, information processing and neuroecology; behavioral genetics; sociogenomics, behavioral plasticity and behavioral syndromes; dispersal and orientation in space and time; and relevant evolutionary and functional theory.