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Animal Behaviour is a monthly publication for biologists, ethologists, psychologists, and others interested in animal behaviour. It covers topics such as behavioural ecology, evolution, sociobiology, ethology, psychology, physiology, and more.
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Animal behavior is the study of why animals act the way they do, based on their physiology, anatomy, genes, and environment. Explore the causes and evolution of animal behavior, from sexual cannibalism to social organizations, and how it relates to human and environmental issues.
12. März 2024 · Learn about the scientific study of animal behaviour, its history, basic concepts, and applications. Explore how animals adapt to their environment, communicate, and interact with each other and humans.
- Overview
- Key points
- Introduction
- What is behavior?
- Four questions to understand a behavior
- Cues that trigger behavior
- Innate vs. learned behaviors
- Mostly innate behaviors
- Partly innate, partly learned behaviors
- Mostly learned behaviors
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What exactly counts as behavior? What triggers behaviors? Are they hard-wired in animals' genes, or learned based on experience?
•Animal behavior includes all the ways animals interact with other organisms and the physical environment.
•Behavior can also be defined as a change in the activity of an organism in response to a stimulus, an external or internal cue or combo of cues.
•To fully understand a behavior, we want to know what causes it, how it develops in an individual, how it benefits an organism, and how it evolved.
•Some behaviors are innate, or genetically hardwired, while others are learned, or developed through experience. In many cases, behaviors have both an innate component and a learned component.
•Behavior is shaped by natural selection. Many behaviors directly increase an organism's fitness, that is, they help it survive and reproduce.
•Animal behavior includes all the ways animals interact with other organisms and the physical environment.
•Behavior can also be defined as a change in the activity of an organism in response to a stimulus, an external or internal cue or combo of cues.
•To fully understand a behavior, we want to know what causes it, how it develops in an individual, how it benefits an organism, and how it evolved.
•Some behaviors are innate, or genetically hardwired, while others are learned, or developed through experience. In many cases, behaviors have both an innate component and a learned component.
Do the squirrels in your neighborhood bury acorns underground? Does your cat start meowing around the time you usually feed her? Do you start hanging around the kitchen when it’s close to dinnertime?
If you've noticed any of these things, congratulations—you've made your first observations in behavioral biology! These are all examples of animal behaviors. Yep, you and I count as animals too. In fact, these behaviors are just a tiny sampling of the amazing and diverse behaviors we can see in nature.
We could ask what behavior is used for, but it might be better to ask, what isn't it used for? Animals have behaviors for almost every imaginable aspect of life, from finding food to wooing mates, from fighting off rivals to raising offspring. Some of these behaviors are innate, or hardwired, in an organism's genes. For instance, this is true of the squirrel and its acorn.1 Other behaviors are learned, such as your tendency to hang around the kitchen at dinnertime or your ability to read the words on this screen.
In this article, we’ll take a closer look at animal behavior—how it’s studied, how it evolves, and how it can run the gamut from hardwired to learned.
Broadly speaking, animal behavior includes all the ways animals interact with other members of their species, with organisms of other species, and with their environment.
Behavior can also be defined more narrowly as a change in the activity of an organism in response to a stimulus, an external or internal cue or combination of cues.
For example, your dog might start drooling—a change in activity—in response to the sight of food—a stimulus.
Behavioral biology is the study of the biological and evolutionary bases for behavior. Modern behavioral biology draws on work from the related but distinct disciplines of ethology and comparative psychology.
•Ethology is a field of basic biology, like ecology or genetics. It focuses on the behaviors of diverse organisms in their natural environment.
•Comparative psychology is an extension of work done in human psychology. It focuses largely on a few species studied in a lab setting.
Nikolaas (Niko) Tinbergen was a Dutch ornithologist, or bird biologist, who studied behavior and is now considered one of the founders of the field of ethology. Based on his own research, Tinbergen proposed four basic questions helpful in understanding any animal behavior.
Let's look at these questions, using the production of song by the zebra finch—a common songbird—as an example.
1.Causation—What causes the behavior? What triggers the behavior, and what body parts, functions, and molecules are involved in carrying it out?
Example: Singing is triggered in zebra finches by social cues, such as the proximity of a potential mate, as well as the appropriate hormonal state. The ability to produce songs is influenced by male hormones and occurs mainly in male birds. Songs are produced when air flows from air sacs in the bronchii through an organ called the syrinx. Certain parts of the brain control song production and are well-developed in male zebra finches.
2.Development—How does the behavior develop? Is the behavior present early in life? Does it change over the course of the organism's lifetime? What experiences are necessary for its development?
Example: Young male zebra finches first listen to the songs of nearby males of their species, particularly their fathers. Then, they start to practice singing. By adulthood, male zebra finches have learned to produce their own songs, which are unique but often have similarities to those of their fathers. Once a finch has perfected its song, the song remains fixed for life.
At its core, an animal behavior is a response to an internal or external cue. Through behavior, animals can act on the information they receive in ways that will, hopefully, favor their survival and reproductive success.
What kinds of cues can trigger behavior? In some cases, the cue is largely external:
•In hibernation, an animal goes into a den or burrow, reduces its metabolic rate, and enters a state of inactivity during the winter, conserving resources while conditions are harsh and food is scarce. Environmental cues often trigger hibernation behavior. For instance, brown bears enter their den and hibernate when temperature drops to 0o C and snowfall begins.2
•Estivation is similar to hibernation, but it occurs during the summer months. Some desert animals estivate in response to dry conditions. This shift helps them survive the harshest months of the year.3 The snails in the photo below climb to the tops of fence posts to estivate.
•Migration is a behavior in which animals move from one location to another in a seasonal pattern. For instance, monarch butterflies living in the northern and central United States migrate to Mexico in the autumn, where they spend the winter. Environmental cues that trigger the autumn migration include air temperature, day length, and food availability.4
In other cases, the cue for a behavior may be internal. For instance, some behaviors occur with a circadian rhythm, meaning that they are triggered by the animal's internal body clock. You, for example, tend to wake up and become active at roughly the same time each day. As you may have discovered if you've ever taken a long flight, your body's alarm clock will still "go off" at the same time even if the external cues change, which is what causes jet lag!
When we are trying to understand how a behavior develops and how it arose evolutionarily, one important question is whether the behavior is genetically preprogrammed or acquired through experience. Let's consider some vocab:
•Innate behaviors are genetically hardwired and are inherited by an organism from its parents.
•Learned behaviors are not inherited. They develop during an organism's lifetime as the result of experience and environmental influence.
Behavioral biologists have found that many behaviors have both an innate and a learned component. So, it's generally most accurate for us to ask to what extent a behavior is innate or learned.
There are some examples of behaviors that are really and truly hardwired. These behaviors take place in a highly predictable way in response to the right stimulus, even if the organism has never before encountered that stimulus.
For example, an adult salamander will swim perfectly if it's placed in water, even if it never saw water when it was young and has never watched another salamander swim.5 In this case, the behavior of swimming can only be explained as something genetically preprogrammed in the salamander.
In other cases, an organism is genetically programmed to develop a behavior, but the form the behavior takes depends on the individual's experience.
One example is the learning of a song by a zebra finch or other songbird, as we saw above. All male zebra finches will begin listening to and learning song at about the same age and practicing and producing song at a slightly later age. Although this pattern is genetically determined, the exact features of the song a bird sings will depend on the songs it hears during its learning period.
In other cases, behaviors are largely dependent on experience—they're learned—and can't be fully explained by genetic preprogramming.
For instance, if a rat receives a food reward each time it pushes a lever, it will quickly learn to push the lever in order to get the food. Similarly, if a cow gets an electric shock each time it brushes up against an electric fence, like the one below, it will rapidly learn to avoid the fence.6 Pushing a lever to get a reward and avoiding electric fences are not hardwired in rats and cows but are, instead, learned behaviors the animals develop through experience.
Learn how behavioral biology studies the causes, development, functions, and evolution of animal behaviors. Explore examples of innate and learned behaviors, and how they are shaped by natural selection.
29. Apr. 2024 · Animal behaviour is the scientific study of the behaviour of animals. The discipline covers study under experimental conditions, behaviourism, or natural conditions, ethology.
Ethology is a branch of zoology that studies the behaviour of non-human animals. It has its scientific roots in the work of Charles Darwin and of American and German ornithologists of the late 19th and early 20th century, including Charles O. Whitman, Oskar Heinroth, and Wallace Craig.
The secret knowledge of animals. 45-minute documentary celebrates its TV premiere on ARD. Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior. "We want to understand and predict animal decision-making in the natural world." Evidence for medical wound treatment in a wild animal.
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