animal behavior

• Animal behavior


  An action carried out by muscles under control of the nervous system in response to a stimulus
• Types of animal behaviors


  • Foraging/anti-predator behavior
  • Social behavior (aggression, pair bonding, group dynamics)
  • Reproductive behavior (mating and parental care)
  • Habitat selection, territoriality, and migration
  • Communication
  • Learning, memory, cognition
• Ethology


  Study of animal behavior in 'natural' settings, focus is on behavioral processes rather than taxonomic group
• Comparative psychology


  Study of animal behavior and how it specifically relates to humans, often places non-human animals in 'artificial' situations to explore phenomena like learning and memory
• Behavioral ecology


  The study of the ecological and evolutionary basis for animal behavior, integrates proximate (how) and ultimate (why) explanations
• Other fields related to animal behavior

  • Behavioral endocrinology
  • Behavioral economics
  • Evolutionary psychology
  • Neuroethology
  • Sociobiology
• Tinbergen's 4 questions


  1. Mechanism (What stimulus elicits the behavior, and what physiological mechanisms mediate the response?)

  2. Ontogeny (How does the animal's experience during growth and development influence the response?)

  3. Adaptation (How does the behavior aid survival and reproduction?)

  4. Phylogeny (What is the behavior's evolutionary history?)
• Ultimate causation


  Behavior can be explained in terms of reproductive success (balancing costs and benefits)
• Behavior varies among individuals, some component of the behavior is genetically inherited, and an individual's reproductive success depends in part on how the behavior is performed
• Proximate causation


  Stimuli elicit behavior, including external stimuli (environmental cues) and internal stimuli (internal sensory systems, hormones and nervous signaling)
• Communication


  The transmission and reception of signals, a signal is a behavior that causes a change in another animal's behavior
• Types of animal communication signals


  • Visual signals
  • Auditory signals
  • Tactile signals
  • Chemical signals (pheromones)
• Innate behavior


  Developmentally fixed and does not vary among individuals
• Learned behavior


  Modified based on experience
• Associative learning


  Relating one feature of the environment with another, including operant conditioning and classical conditioning
• Spatial learning


  Mental representation of the spatial environment including locations of objects/features and their relative relationships to one another
• Social learning


  Learning through the observation of others, can lead to the development of culture and memes (cultural units of transmission)
• The cultural tradition of using stones to crack nuts has arisen in only some chimpanzee populations, not all
• Cognition


  Complex form of thinking that may involve awareness, reasoning, recollection, and judgement
• 'Selfless' behavior (altruism)


  Can be explained by manipulation, reciprocity, kin selection, and game theory evaluating behavioral 'strategies'
• Frequency dependent selection: the fitness of different phenotypes (e.g. behavioral phenotypes) is dependent on the frequency of other phenotypes in the populations