Transcript 02_Foundations

Animal Behavior
IB 429
ANSC 466
ANTH 442
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Chapters assigned correspond to 8th edition of text
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 - how
mechanisms responsible for interactions
Ultimate questions - why
how 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.
History of the study of animal behavior
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.
Blurton-Jones (1976) documented Kalahari
bushmen’s (!Kung) knowledge of animal behavior
Hunter-gatherer society, similar to most of
human’s history.
- Discriminated data
from theory
- Developed
hypotheses
- Used reasoned
skepticism
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 stimuli
Light
Butyric acid
Heat
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
Niko
Tinbergen
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
Ethology
Behavioral Ecology
Animal Communication
Behavioral Genetics
Sociobiology
Evolutionary Psychology
Comparative Psychology
Physiological Psychology
Neurobiology
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?