Transcript Animal Behavior

Animal Behavior
Animal Behavior
• Ethologist: a scientist who studies animal
behavior in nature
– Is behavior inherited?
– Is behavior learned?
– Can a behavior be both?
– What triggers the expression of a behavior?
Much animal behavior is. . .
• Stereotypic: performed in the same way every
time
• Species-specific: little variation in the way
individuals of a single species do something
But it can be modified!
• Even spiders need to say “no” to drugs!
Evidence that a behavior is inherited
• Konrad Lorenz
• Deprivation: Ex. The crazy squirrel!
• Hybridization: Ex. The mallard ballet!
Types of Behavior Development
• 1. Natural Selection
• An animal that successfully completes a
helpful behavior survives to pass on the
behavior to offspring
• Those whose genes fit the conditions survive.
Types of Behavior Development
• 2. Innate Behavior
• Appears in fully functional form when first
performed.
• Ex. Startle behavior in a baby; purpose is selfpreservation
• Web building, nest building
Types of Behavior Development
• 3. Learning
• Development of behaviors through experience
• Determines final shape of innate behaviors
• 5 types of learning…will list these later.
Behavioral “Releasers”
• Releasers: stimuli, usually sensory, that elicit
or bring about a behavior.
• Niko Tinbergen
• Konrad Lorenz
What triggers baby gulls to beg for
food?
Chicks eventually refine their behavior by ‘learning’…the learn to beg only from their parents
More evidence that learning shapes
behavior
• Tinbergen & the female digger wasp
Imprinting – A type of learning
• Konrad Lorenz
• Learning, during a critical period, a complex set of
stimuli that can later serve as a releaser
Do birds have to “learn” to sing?
• Young sparrows listen to adult males singing
but are too young to sing themselves
• Young sparrows that NEVER hear an adult sing
cannot express their species’ song correctly
• If a bird goes deaf after he makes a song memory but
before he is mature enough to sing…he is out of luck
A bird has to “learn” twice to sing correctly…once to make a memory and then to use
auditory feedback to perfect the song.
Learning and modifying behavior
seems to be adaptive.
• Then why is so much of animal behavior
genetically determined?
Hormones & Behavior
• Why lady birds don’t sing…
• Why Marlin should have become Nemo’s mom…
Fruit Fly Mating—It’s All in the Genes!
Honey Bees and the Waggle Dance
Pheromones
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Alarm system
Mark the trail
Releaser pheromones
Primer pheromones
Aggregation
pheromones
Please associate CLASSICAL CONDITIONING WITH
Ivan Pavlov (Pavlov’s conditioning)
Skinner Box
Please associate OPERANT CONDITIONING
with B. F. Skinner
Circadian Rhythms
Defense Mechanisms
1. Aposematism
2. Crypsis
3. Deceptive Markings
4. Mullerian Mimicry
Fritz
5. Batesian Mimicry
“Red touches yellow, you’re a dead fellow;
Red touches black, you’re okay, Jack”