Ethology
Ethology combines laboratory and field science, with a strong relation to neuroanatomy, ecology, and evolutionary biology.
He pursued his interest in behaviour by encouraging his protégé George Romanes, who investigated animal learning and intelligence using an anthropomorphic method, anecdotal cognitivism, that did not gain scientific support.
[2] Other early ethologists, such as Eugène Marais, Charles O. Whitman, Oskar Heinroth, Wallace Craig and Julian Huxley, instead concentrated on behaviours that can be called instinctive in that they occur in all members of a species under specified circumstances.
[1] Due to the work of Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen, ethology developed strongly in continental Europe during the years prior to World War II.
[5] Lorenz, Tinbergen, and von Frisch were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1973 for their work of developing ethology.
[8] E. O. Wilson's book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis appeared in 1975,[9] and since that time, the study of behaviour has been much more concerned with social aspects.
[10] Furthermore, a substantial rapprochement with comparative psychology has occurred, so the modern scientific study of behaviour offers a spectrum of approaches.
In 2020, Tobias Starzak and Albert Newen from the Institute of Philosophy II at the Ruhr University Bochum postulated that animals may have beliefs.
Biotic factors include members of the same species (e.g. sexual behavior), predators (fight or flight), or parasites and diseases.
[12] Webster's Dictionary defines instinct as "A largely inheritable and unalterable tendency of an organism to make a complex and specific response to environmental stimuli without involving reason".
[13] This covers fixed action patterns like beak movements of bird chicks,[14] and the waggle dance of honeybees.
[15] An important development, associated with the name of Konrad Lorenz though probably due more to his teacher, Oskar Heinroth, was the identification of fixed action patterns.
Fixed action patterns are now considered to be instinctive behavioural sequences that are relatively invariant within the species and that almost inevitably run to completion.
[14] One example of a releaser is the beak movements of many bird species performed by newly hatched chicks, which stimulates the mother to regurgitate food for her offspring.
For example, prairie dogs (Cynomys ludovicianus) give alarm calls when predators approach, causing all individuals in the group to quickly scramble down burrows.
[31] A well-documented example of social transmission of a behaviour occurred in a group of macaques on Hachijojima Island, Japan.
[33] Mother orcas teach their young to catch pinnipeds by pushing them onto the shore and encouraging them to attack the prey.
Because the mother orca is altering her behaviour to help her offspring learn to catch prey, this is evidence of teaching.
[38] When biologists interested in evolution theory first started examining social behaviour, some apparently unanswerable questions arose, such as how the birth of sterile castes, like in bees, could be explained through an evolving mechanism that emphasizes the reproductive success of as many individuals as possible, or why, amongst animals living in small groups like squirrels, an individual would risk its own life to save the rest of the group.
The theory suggests that conspecifics positioned at the centre of a group will reduce the likelihood predations while those at the periphery will become more vulnerable to attack.
[10][page needed] Honeybees are a notable example of this, using the waggle dance to communicate the location of flowers to the rest of their hive.
Living in close proximity to other animals can facilitate the transmission of parasites and disease, and groups that are too large may also experience greater competition for resources and mates.
