Animal Behavior

IB 429

ANSC 466

ANTH 442

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Outline for today:

What is the study of Animal Behavior?

Why do we study Animal Behavior?

History of modern Animal Behavior.

What is Animal Behavior?

The study of how and why animals interact with each other (both within and among species) and their environment.

Proximate questions - howmechanisms responsible for interactions

Ultimate questions - whyhow these interactions influence an

individual's survival and reproduction.

Some examples:

Intraspecific interactions

mate choice

male competition

alarm calls

parental care

Some examples:

Interspecific interactions

predation

parasitism

mutualism

competition

Some examples:

Interactions with the environment

foraging

nest site selection

signal modification

Why study behavior?

Possible first science: Our survival dependent on knowledge of other animals (prey/competitors/predators).

Control/management of species: Food and game species, agricultural pests, invasive species, endangered species.

Understanding/modification of our own behavior? Studies of how birds learn and develop songs provide unique insights into the development and neural control of speech in humans.

Curiosity.

Science for science’s sake.

Achieve a better understanding of the species we share the Earth with.

Almost any behavior performed by any animal may be interesting to study.

Paleolithic art from 40,000+ years ago provide indirect evidence that primitive humans observed the behavior of animals.

Cave paintings portray herding animals in groups, animal migration, certain predators hunting in packs, and solitary animals alone.

History of the study of animal behavior

- Discriminated data from theory

- Developed hypotheses

- Used reasoned skepticism

Blurton-Jones (1976) documented Kalahari bushmen’s (!Kung) knowledge of animal behavior

Hunter-gatherer society, similar to most of human’s history.

How do we often interpret

animal behavior?Anthropomorphism

Shirley Strum determined that baboons had female dominated societies

History of modern animal behavior research

Ethology: Objective description of behavior in the field, using observation.

C. O. Whitman (1800's) coined the term instinct to describe the display patterns of pigeons.

The ethogram, a graph of the time course or switch points in a sequence of behaviors, became a way of categorizing species-typical behaviors.

Many instincts are triggered by stimuli (from the environment or other animals).

Jakob von Uexkull (1864-1944) called triggers of instinctive stereotyped behaviors sign stimuli . (Believed that we needed to think like the animal - not anthropomorphize).

Example: tick – how do behaviors help get a blood meal?

Immature females are at first only sensitive to light (not touch). They crawl towards light, which elevates her off the ground (on a tip of grass).

Example: tick – how do behaviors help get a blood meal?

Then the tick is only sensitive to butyric acid, which mammals produce. When she senses butyric acid, she drops.

Example: tick – how do behaviors help get a blood meal?

Next the tick is only sensitive to temperature, no longer chemical or visual cues. She will burrow into any warm surface, and will suck any warm liquid, having no sense of taste.

Example: tick – how do behaviors help get a blood meal?

“The whole rich world around the tick shrinks into a scanty framework consisting … of three receptor cues – her Umwelt.”

Jakob von Uexkull

sign stimuliLightButyric acidHeat

Charles Darwin

Realized that traits related directly to mate acquisition and mate choice, were distinctly different from other traits under natural selection (e.g., foraging ability). He coined the term sexual selection to emphasize the distinction between the two processes.

Sexual Selection “…depends on the success of certain individuals over others of the same sex, in relation to propagation of the species...”

Charles Darwin 1871

Founders of the field of Animal Behavior

NikoTinbergen

Konrad Lorenz

Karl von Frisch

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1973"for their discoveries concerning organization and elicitation of individual and social behaviour patterns"

Modern Ethology: the study of the evolution and functional significance of behavior.

Konrad Lorenz (1903-1989) examined genetically programmed behaviors in young and imprinting.

Young geese form an image of “parent” just after hatching. If the hatchlings first encounter a human, they will imprint on him and follow him around as if he were their mother.

Karl von Frisch (1886 - 1982), pioneered studies in bee communication and foraging.

Demonstrated that honey bees have color vision.

Honey bees use a dance language to communicate the location of resources to other bees.

Niko Tinbergen (1907-1988) formulated a method studying animal behavior (Tinbergen, 1963)

His approach had a strong Darwinian influence: understand the ultimate (evolutionary) reasons for behavior.

Demonstrated that digger wasps used visual landmarks to relocate their nests.

A -- Animal refers to the organisms.

B -- Behavior refers to the observable actions of the organism.

C -- Causation refers to the proximate causes of behavior such as genes, hormones, and nerve impulses that control the expression of behaviors.

D -- Development refers to the ontogeny of behaviors such as imprinting, or in the case of cognition, learning.

E -- Evolution refers to the phylogenetic context in which behaviors are found. For example, the prevalence of parental care in birds, but not reptiles (with some exceptions) is an example of the taxonomic affiliations of some behaviors.

F -- Function refers to the adaptive value or contribution that the behavior makes to fitness.

(from B. Sinervo UCSC)

The ethological approach of Lorenz, Tinbergen, and von Frisch largely focused on the behavior of organisms in their natural environment.

At the same time, another group of scientists focused on the mechanistic underpinnings of behavior.

This research used model organisms (e.g., Norway rat) in controlled laboratory settings.

Behaviorism

B.F. Skinner(1904-1990)

Experimental studies of behavior in the laboratory, using manipulation

“universal principles” of behavior

Learning: classical and operant conditioning

Classic work by B. F. Skinner lead to the development of the use of learning paradigms.

The Skinner Box remains an important tool in the field of animal psychology.

Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology

A synthesis between the evolutionary traditions of modern ethology, and the mechanistic studies of comparative psychology

Krebs and Davies (1978)

Sociobiology

How do principles of modern ethology explain the evolution of complex social systems.The theory has been the target of much controversy because of its application to humans.

E. O. Wilson (1975).

Evolutionary Psychology

Use the approaches of behavioral ecology and sociobiology to explain human behavior (murder, female choice).

Are humans subject to the same “rules” that shape the behavior of other organisms?

The study of animal biology is interdisciplinary:

Natural history

Ecology

Chemistry

Physics

Evolution/Genetics

Psychology

Anatomy/Physiology

EthologyBehavioral EcologyAnimal CommunicationBehavioral GeneticsSociobiologyEvolutionary Psychology Comparative PsychologyPhysiological PsychologyNeurobiology

The Debate on Nature versus Nurture

What influences behavior - genes or environment? There is no simple answer, we need to examine the complex interaction between genes and the environment.

What can we learn about human behavior by observing animals?