Chapter 6: Nervous coordination and behaviour

• Animals communicate to identify members of their own species, attract the opposite sex, raise an alarm, mark food trails, trigger other complex behaviors, display threat, perform mating rituals, establish territoriality, signal food, and make alarm calls
• Animals develop special behaviors to rear their young, aiming to produce healthy offspring and increase the chances of survival for the offspring
• Animal behaviour is how an organism reacts/responds to things in its environment, helping it to survive
• Types of mating strategies include mating for life (e.g., Swans), having several mates over a lifetime, mating for the breeding season (e.g., Penguins), and having several mates over a breeding season (e.g., cats)
• Pros of parental care include increasing chances of reproducing and passing parental genes to the next generation
• Animal communication & reproductive behaviour

  • Sound signals
  • Visual Signals
  • Chemical signals
  • Animal communication
  • Courtship/mating
  • Parental Care methods
• Cons of parental care include using up time and resources, vulnerability to starvation and predators
• Innate behaviour is instinctive, not learned, and can be a simple reflex or a complicated behavior
• Some animals synchronize breeding behavior and develop special behaviors for rearing their young to increase the chance of survival for offspring
• Studying animal behaviour is important to improve captive animal management, manage animal populations, improve animal welfare, and train animals
• Habituation occurs when a stimulus is repeated multiple times and eventually stops having an effect, whether good or bad
• Imprinting is a learned behavior where a young animal fixates on the first object it experiences and follows it
• Operant conditioning is trial and error learning where behaviors resulting in pleasant outcomes tend to be repeated
• Classical conditioning is a type of learning where an automatic response is paired with a specific stimulus, e.g., dogs salivating to the sound of a bell associated with food
• Animal behaviour


  • Behaviour, Innate behaviour, Habituation, Imprinting, Classical conditioning, Operant conditioning
• Receptors and their sense organs

  • Vision/light: eyes
  • Hearing/sound: ears
  • Smell: nose
  • Taste: tongue
  • Touch: skin
• How impulses pass from neurone to neurone

  1. Electrical impulses travel along an axon

  2. Trigger nerve ending of a neurone to release chemical messengers (neurotransmitters)

  3. Neurotransmitters diffuse across synapse and bind receptor molecules on the next neurone to transmit the electrical impulse

  4. Receptor molecules bind only to specific chemicals released, stimulating the 2nd neurone

  5. Chemical is reabsorbed back to presynaptic neurone to be used again
• Nerve cells

  • Have long fibre (axon) insulated by a fatty sheath
  • Have tiny branches (dendrons) with branches further as dendrites at each end
  • Connect sensory to motor neurones
• The nervous system uses electrical impulses to enable quick reaction to the surrounding and coordination of response
• Reflex actions

  1. Automatic actions (don't involve conscious areas of the brain), rapid

  2. Involves 3 types of neurones: sensory, relay, motor

  3. Impulse bypasses conscious parts of the brain to allow for a short time between the stimulus and reflex action
• The cerebral cortex is responsible for consciousness, memory, intelligence, and language
• Receptors detect stimuli (change in environment) and are usually found clustered together in sense organs
• The medulla controls unconscious activities like breathing and heart rate
• The cerebellum is responsible for muscle coordination and movement
• Pathway of nervous impulse

  1. Stimulus is detected by receptors

  2. Information from the receptors (in the form of electrical impulses) passes along sensory neurones to CNS

  3. CNS coordinates response by transmitting electrical impulse via motor neurons to effector organs (muscles or glands) to be carried out