ANIMAL BEHAVIOR

Behavior: What is it?

 Behavior:
 Everything an animal does & how it does it

Ethology:
 The scientific study of how animals behave,
particularly in their natural environment
 Ethology: The pioneers in the study of
animal behavior – 1973 Nobel Prize

Karl von Frisch

Niko Tinbergen Konrad Lorenz
 Types of behaviors
Innate behaviors Learned behaviors
• Automatic, • Modified by
developmentally fixed experience
• Despite different • Variable
environments, all
individuals exhibit the
behavior
 Animal Learning
Innate • Learned
• Fixed action Pattern • Associative learning
• Imprinting ex: Classical conditioning
ex: Operant conditioning
• Habituation
• Insight (cognitive)
learning
• Observational learning
 Fixed Action Patterns
• Innate behavior
• Sequence of behaviors
that are essentially
unchangeable and
conducted to completion
once it is started
• Triggered by a sign
stimulus
• Ex: Male stigglebacks
exhibit aggressive
territoriality…attack on
red belly stimulus
 Fixed Action Patterns
• Fixed-Action Pattern: Graylag
goose rolls the egg back to the
nest using side-to-side head
Fixed-Action Pattern: The begging
motions.
behaviour of newly hatched chicks
• Sign stimulus: The appearance (raised heads, open mouths, and
of an object near the nest. If the loud cheeps).
goose loses the egg during the Sign stimulus: Parent landing at
retrieval process, it stops the head the nest.
motion, but continues the "pulling"
motion of retrieval.
 Habituation
• Loss of responsiveness to unimportant stimuli.
• “cry-wolf” effect
• Learn not to respond to repeated occurrences of
stimulus
• Ex: Brown bear habituation - bear viewing leads to bear
tolerating people at close range
 Imprinting
• Innate behavior that is learned during a critical period early in
life
• Both learning and innate components
• Ex: Konrad Lorenz was “mother” to these imprinted graylag
goslings
 Imprinting
• Imprinting for conservation: Conservation biologists
have taken advantage of imprinting by young whooping
cranes as a means to teach the birds a migration route.
A pilot wearing a crane suit in an ultra light plane acts as
a surrogate parent. Crane handlers wear
special suits to prevent the
cranes from imprinting on
humans
 Insight Learning
• Is the ability to do
something right the
first time with no prior
experience. It
requires reasoning
ability – the skill to
look at a problem and
come up with an
appropriate solution.
 Observational Learning
• Is the ability of an organism to learn how to do
something by watching another individual do it first,
even if they have never attempted it themselves.

• chimps would observe the chimp

in the cage that had insight
learning and stacked the boxes to
get to the bananas, see the
failure, and then see the solution.
• When these chimps got in the
cage, bang-zoom, they got to the
solution a lot faster, arguably due
to modeling effects.
 Observational learning
• Young chimpanzees who watch their
mothers crack nuts with rock tools before
learning the technique themselves
 Associative learning
• Is the process by which animals take one
stimulus and associate it with another.
• Learned behavior
• Examples:
Classical conditioning
Operant conditioning
 Classical Conditioning
• Type of associative learning
• Stimulus & reward/punishment
• Ex: Ivan Pavlov’s dogs
 Operant conditioning
• Type of associative learning
• Trial and error learning
• Different from classical conditioning, because the association is made between the animal’s own
behavior and a response.

B.F. Skinner
 Operant conditioning

• Having received a face full of quills, a

young coyote has probably learned to
avoid porcupines
 Animal Movement
• Three types of animal movement
1) Kinesis
2) Taxis
3) Migration
 Kinesis
• Seemingly random change in the speed of a movement in
response to a stimulus
• When an organism is in a place that it enjoys, it slows down,
and when in a bad environment, it speeds up. Overall this
leads to an organisms spending more time in favorable
environments
• Ex: Pillbugs – (AP Lab 11) pillbugs prefer moist
environments
 Taxis
• A reflex movement towards (positive taxis) or away
(negative taxis) from a stimulus
 Migration
• Complex behavior, but still under genetic control
– cyclic movement of animals over long
distances according to the time of year
Bird Migration – Migrating Sandpipers
 Animal Communication
• Animals communicate in many ways…
communication need not always be vocal
 Chemical communication
 Visual communication
 Auditory communication
 Tactile communication
 Chemical communication
– Pheromones Trail pheromones - ants

Alarm pheromones
Sex pheromones
Trail pheromones

Alarm pheromones - minnows

Sex pheromones - insects

 Visual Communication
• Communication through the use of visual
cues
• Ex: Tail feather displays of male peacocks
 Auditory Communication
• Bird song: • Insect Song:
• Mixed learned and innate • Innate, genetically controlled
• Most have a critical learning • Frogs croaking in the spring
period

Red winged blackbird

 Tactile communication
• Communication through the use of touch
• A major form of primate tactile
communication is grooming

A subordinate monkey grooming a dominant monkey.

 Honeybee Communication
• Bees provide an example of communication that involves
chemical, tactile, and auditory components.
• Bees do a “waggle dance” to communicate location of
food
• Dance provides distance and directional cues
• Chemical cues – regurgitation of food source provides
information “what kind of food”
 Animal Social Behaviors
Agonistic behavior:
 Results from conflict over resources
 Often involves intimidation and submission
 Often a matter of which animal can mount the
most threatening display and scare the other into
submission (symbolic: ususually no harm done)
 Animal Social Behaviors
Dominance Hierarchies:
 Ranking of power among group-living animals (subject to
change)
 Member with most power “alpha”
 Second in command “beta”
 Benefit: Less energy wasted over conflicts over food and
resources

A submissive chimpanzee
lets the dominant (alpha)
chimpanzee know that he or
she is not a threat through
non-threatening postures
such as presenting their
back, crouching and bowing
 Animal Social Behaviors
Territoriality
 Animals defend a physical geographic area
against other individuals
 Area is defended because of benefits derived
from it: food, mates, etc
 Animal species vary in their degree of
territoriality

Nesting in birds
 Animal Social Behaviors
Altruistic Behavior
 Action in which an organism helps another at its own expense
reduces individual fitness but increases fitness of recipient
kin selection
 Animal Social Behaviors
Inclusive fitness:
 Represents the overall ability of
individuals to pass their own genes on
to the next generation as well as
providing aid to closely related
individuals (related individuals share
many of the same genes)
 This concept can explain many cases
of altruism in nature
 Animal Social Behavior
Reciprocal altruism:
 Animals behave altruistically toward
others who are not relatives, hoping
that the favor will be returned sometime
in the future.
 Animals rarely display this behavior…it
is limited to species with stable social
groups
 Animal Social Behavior
Optimal foraging:
 Natural selection favors those who
choose foraging strategies that
maximize the differential between costs
and benefits.
 If the effort involved in obtaining food
outweighs the nutritive value of the
food, forget about it.