Lecture 1 Introduction to Animal Behavior PDF

Introduction to animal behavior Ent 104 Fields of Behavior Animal behavior Behavioral Ecology Ethology Biological sciences Neurobiology Neuroethology Neuroscience Neuroscience Psychology Sociology Anthropology Cognitive Science Social sciences Ethology 1930s-1960s Konrad Lorenz Imprinting Stimulus r...

Introduction to animal behavior Ent 104 Fields of Behavior Animal behavior Behavioral Ecology Ethology Biological sciences Neurobiology Neuroethology Neuroscience Neuroscience Psychology Sociology Anthropology Cognitive Science Social sciences Ethology 1930s-1960s Konrad Lorenz Imprinting Stimulus response Niko Tinbergen Interested in stimulus responses in the control of simple reflexive behaviors Came up with an early version of the levels of analysis Karl von Frisch Waggle dance and social behavior of honey bees Experimental science pioneer Stimulus response: stimuli The environment is complex and humans perceive it as such Animal’s, however, may view the world in a much simpler manner They may only pay attention to one component of a complex pattern Rate of movement What is moving is irrelevant One particular color, or pattern Zebras’s stripes may disorient flies Stimulus Response: responses Instinctive vs learned behavior Early ethologists thought most animal behavior is instinctive Fixed and inflexible They thought extremely particular stimuli elicited fixed instinctive responses Is this really useful? Isn’t this oversimplified? No, The adaptations to the right could only work if something like this simple model is true There are countless such examples Especially in the insects Tinbergen: Superstimulus Imprinting Geese eggs Central pattern generators Nerves are organized into fixed circuits that control stereotyped periodic behavior like walking Function independent of sensory inputs Neuron A connects to B to C to D, etc in a clock like fashion Thousands of neurons can be involved Circuit repeats with the period of the behavior to create a rhythm Significance? Behavior can be seen as hopelessly complex Freudian style explanations for animal behavior were standard prior to the ethologists Showing how some behaviors are quite simple and compartmentalized shows that this is not always true The reductionist approach which is central to biology will work on behaviors that can be broken down into lots of small simple pieces Hence, Lorenz and Tinbergen brought animal behavior into the mainstream of biology Behavioral Ecology Intersection between ecology, behavior, and evolution A behavior is only adaptive within a particular ecological context Ecology defines selective pressures which drive evolution of behavior Metallic beetles and coke bottles Jewel beetles Using orange, shiny, and dimpled as the only mating cues was adaptive in central Australia Because nothing else looked like this Evolution favors simple and cheap When the environment changed, it became maladaptive Daphnia spines Daphnia ambigua Sometimes have helmets and spines Varies with Place, season What controls this phenotypic plasticity? Variable traits in the same organism Why is the helmet adaptive? Previous work Previous work had shown that: Helmets only form at about 11° Celsius Turbulent water produced helmets Small ones Consensus view was that helmets were caused by physical factors Hebert and Grewe 1985 Hypotheses An alternative hypothesis is that the presence of predatory insect larva induces defensive morphology in daphnia Test the hypothesis Chemical cues in the water released from predatory insect larva induce defensive phenotypic plasticity in the daphnia Methods Wild caught daphnia from different regions grown in the lab Chaoboris collected and boiled in water to release chemicals Daphnia raised in cups of water with and without Chaoboris extract predator cue control Helmut length Results Body length Conclusions Ecological environments critical to behavioral adaptations Behaviorist study the morphology underlying behavior as well as behavior Color patterns, sensory abilities, morphology, etc Typically such adaptations are fixed, but phenotypical plasticity tends to attract more attention The cues used are simple Hence the landscape (biotic or abiotic) is vast but the relevant information to the animal is simple A signal or cue is a simple reliable indicator of a more complex pattern Sociobiology Sociobiology: A 1975 book Summarized the knowledge of animal behavior to date Argued that the knowledge gained could be applied to human behavior Sociobiology pros Gave rise in part to fields such as biological anthropology and evolutionary psychology The behavioral ecology approach (evolutionary basis of behavior) is applicable to some human behavior Sociobiology cons Much of human behavior is based on learning Behavioral ecologists tend to study genetically based adaptations Learning is studied but not so well understood Human behavior is much more complex than animal behavior and new tools are necessary Maladaptive behavior common in humans spite Animal Behavior today We will touch on most of the topics currently popular in behavior in this class Social behavior and reproductive behavior dominate the field Social behavior: Social insects loom large Reproductive behavior Birds loom large Animal Behavior Behavioral Ecology focused on adaptive behavior Implies a long evolutionary history Novel environments are different Raw variation rather than adaptive traits Evolutionary theory Evolution is not always a useful theory for understanding behavior Adaptation is simple Maladaptive and neutral is hard Not evolutionarily grounded Behavior can be biologically based, but not evolutionarily explainable Urban ecology Many behaviorists now study animals living in anthrocentric environments Cities, farms, etc The behavior is a complex mixture of adaptive, maladaptive, and neutral behavior In general, the notion that one must find a “natural” environment to work in has gone away