Principles of Animal Behaviour

What is the study of animal behaviour?

• Ethology

• a blend of disciplines – comparative psych, bio, antro, math, econ, genetics, behavioural ecology

Darwin’s influence in comparative psychology

• Romanes → scale, anecdotes

• Morgan → observational method, law of parsimony

• Gregor Mendel -→ modern genetics

Tinbergen's four questions

1. Mechanism: What stimuli cause the behaviour? What are the immediate underlying processes? How do terns remember where they are going? How do they find their way?

2. Development: How does behaviour change across the lifespan? Do the babies do this? Where do they mate? How do the young do this flight path?

3. Survival value: How does behaviour change across the lifespan? Wouldn’t it be easier to just stay in one place? It must have survival implications.

4. Evolutionary history: How did the behaviour evolve? What is the evolutionary history of the species? Are they the only birds that behave

Proximate vs. Ultimate causes

• Biologists ask more ultimate cause.

  • Ultimate → Survival value & Evolutionary

• Proximate causes have a trigger.

  • Proximate → Mechanistic & Developmental

How do we define behaviour?

• “coordinated responses of whole living organisms to internal and/or external stimuli”

• Short form: “what an animal does”

Behaviour freq changes

• Behaviours change though the lifespan of an animal and the evolutionary history of a species

• Occurs through: Natural selection, Learning & Cultural transmission

Diff Q’s & Diff approaches

• Conceptual → e.g. Kin selection

• Theoretical → e.g. Optimal Foraging Theory

• Empirical → gathering observational/experimental data to test hypotheses, make predictions