Pest (organism) Pest (organism) A pest is an animal or plant detrimental to humans or human concerns including crops, livestock, and forestry. The term is also used of organisms that cause a nuisance, such as in the home. An older usage is of a deadly epidemic disease, specifically plague. In its broadest sense, a pest is a competitor of humanity. A pest is any living organism, whether animal, plant or fungus, which is invasive or troublesome to plants or animals, human or human concerns, livestock, or human structures. It is a loose concept, as an organism can be a pest in one
Four causes after the ethologist Nikolaas Tinbergen and based on Aristotle's four causes, are complementary categories of explanations for animal behaviour. They are also commonly referred to as levels of analysis. The four questions are on function, what an adaptation does that is selected for in evolution; phylogeny, the evolutionary history of an organism, revealing its relationships to other species; mechanism, namely the proximate cause of a behaviour, such as the role of testosterone in aggression; and ontogeny, the development of an organism from egg to embryo to adult. Four causes The "four causes" are elements of an influential principle in Aristotelian