Behavior
Ethology:
Study of
behavior
Outline
• Behavior is what an animal does and how it does it
• Behaviors have both ultimate and proximate causes
• Certain stimuli trigger innate behaviors called fixed
action patterns
• Learning is experience based modification of behavior
• Rhythmic behaviors sync. Activities with temporal
changes in the environment
• Environmental cues guide movement
• Sociobiology places social behavior in an evolutionary
context
• Competitive social behaviors often represent contests for
resources
• Mating behavior relates directly to an animals fitness
• Communication
• Inclusive fitness can account for most altruistic behavior
Babies make noise when no one is
around
• Trying to fit their vocalizations to internal
templates?
• Eventually turn into complex sounds
• Communication is the result of genetic
cues modified during development by
environmental factors
• Bird song works like this too
Bird songs vs. calls
• Long vs. Short, arbitrary distinction
• Crows have more than 20 different calls
• Ludwig van Beethoven, for example,
included imitations of the Nightingale,
Quail and Cuckoo in his Symphony No. 6
(the Pastoral).
• Pink Floyd's 1969 albums More and
Ummagumma
Behavior
what an animal does and how it does it
• Study of animal behavior is as old as we
are.
– Need it to hunt
– Cave art a study of behavior?
– Domestication: control of behavior
Early 1900s – Ethology becomes
formal discipline
• Due to work of 3 ethologists
– K. Lorenz studied waterfowl and other
organisms
– N. Tinbergen studied gulls and other
organisms
– K. Von Frisch studied communication in bees
Nothing in biology makes sense
except in the light of evolution
• Natural
selection is going
on so animals have to
maximize their fitness
– Recall fitness doesn’t
exactly mean the
strongest
– How we feed
– What mate we choose
Genetic component of behavior
• If genes weren’t involved
behavior wouldn’t be
subject to natural
selection and wouldn’t
change over time
• Genes set up the neural
network that lets us learn.
• Behavioral ecology:
animals increase fitness
by optimal behavior
– Best explanation for the
data
Studying genetic components of
behavior
• Can study twins: If Jacob is
smart is Mack also?
• Can study adoptees. If your
real parents were alcoholics but
your adopted parents are
teetotalers what will you be?
• Some example studies
– Novelty seeking personality, ear
wiggling, perfect pitch
– propensity for
smoking,Alcoholism,
homosexuality
– http://www.ornl.gov/sci/techresourc
es/Human_Genome/elsi/behavior.
shtml#3
Not really twins, but hey.
• Lovebirds show
innate behavior
modified by
experience
Behaviors have both ultimate
and proximate causes
• Ultimate cause: Why did this
happen?
• Ultimate causation - historical
explanations
• Explains why a behavior
evolved
• Study by measuring influence
on survival or reproduction
• Proximate cause: How did this happen?
• Proximate causation - immediate causes
– Explains how behavior works - what
stimulates behavior to occur
– Study by measuring or describing the stimuli
that elicit behavior
– Internal - physiological events (hormones,
nervous system)
– External - environmental stimuli
Example - bird migration
• Ultimate causes birds that migrate
have a selective
advantage over birds
that don't/didn't,
selected for over time,
could be due to long
term climate changes,
glaciation, disease,
taking advantage of
food sources, etc.
Proximate causes
External stimulichanges in
daylength
Internal stimuli hormone levels
Components of Behavior
• 2 Components
– Nature/innate: instinct and genes determine
behavior
– Nurture/learned: experience and learning
influence behavior
– Two extremes are not mutually exclusive, but
work together to influence behavior
Examples of innate behavior
• egg ejection by
cuckoos (brood
parasites)
• freezing behavior of
nestling birds when
exposed to
silhouettes (raptors
versus waterfowl)
Components of Innate Behavior
• Components of Innate
Behavior
• FAP - fixed action pattern,
all or none response
– Once started most animals
will finish activity even if new
stimuli show the activity to be
inappropriate
– Sign stimulus - causes
release of FAP
• Usually obvious aspect of
morphology
Sticklebacks attack red
We’re sensitive to some stimuli
more so than others
• Frog’s are sensitive to movement of prey
– Will starve if surrounded by dead/unmoving
flies
• Supernormal stimulus: artificial stimuli that
elicit a stronger response
– Oystercatchers will rather incubate a giant
model of an egg instead of the real thing
Learned behavior
• Learning: modification of behavior in
response to specific experiences
Learning vs. Maturation
• Doing something faster doesn’t mean
you’ve learned
• Experiment: they kept baby birds from
flapping their wings until they should be
old enough to fly and they flew normally
and immeadiately.
Learning: Habituation
• Loss of
responsiveness to
unimportant stimuli
or stimuli that don’t
provide appropriate
feedback.
• Banner blindness in
web design
Imprinting
• Lorenz’s study
• Chuck Jones study
• Salmon spawn back to
stream of their birth from
ocean;
– Olfactory imprinting
• Critical period: happens
to young and adults
Conservation issues
• minimize/eliminate human presence while
raising California Condors
Classical conditioning
• Associative learning: one
stimulus goes with another,
the roar goes with the lion
• Pavlov married the concepts
of feeding and the sound of a
bell in his dog’s mind
• Alpert Watson conditioned an
11 month old orphan named
Alpert to fear rats
• California Sea Slug  has
20,000 neurons but can be
habituated, and sensitized
• Method’s useful for dealing
with phobias
Learned helplessness
•
•
•
Results from inescapable
punishment
continued failure may inhibit
somebody from experiencing
agency
Experiment: A dog had earlier
been repeatedly conditioned to
associate a sound with electric
shocks didn’t try (later in another
setting) to escape the electric
shocks after that sound and a
flash of light was presented, even
though all the dog would have had
to do is jump over a low divider.
The dog didn't even try to avoid
the "aversive stimulus"; the dog
had previously "learned" that
nothing it did mattered.
Learned helplessness
• people doing mental tasks in the presence
of noise.
• Given a switch that would turn off the
noise, performance improved, even
though subject rarely bothered to turn off
the noise.
• being aware of the ability to have control
was enough to substantially counteract its
distracting effect.
Evidence of optimism?
• Not all of the dogs became helpless.
• About 1/3 of the 150 dogs tried to find
ways out of unpleasant experiences even
if they previously had no control.
I’m an optimistic Steeler Fan
Operant conditioning
• Trial and error learning
• B.F. Skinner’s Skinner Box: rat in box with
lever. Push the lever & food comes out. It
learns to push the lever.
• Acetycholine is released through cerebral
cortex as we try things
• In nature: good / bad tastes
– Remember genes tell us what will taste good
and bad, we learn from there
Observational Learning
• “watch me…”
• Bandura’s Bobo doll
experiment: kids who
watched adults beat
up doll also beat up
doll.
•Kid watched Beavis start a fire
•Started fire
•Cartoon makers are now careful to
not create copyable behavior.
Play
• Activity with no goal, but
is similar to goal-directed
behavior.
• Risky behavior
• “practice” hypothesis play
= learning
– But do they really get
better?
• “exercise” hypothesis
– Fat babies aren’t going to
bring home the bacon
Insight Learning
• Getting it right the first
time with no prior
experience
• Corvidae: Crows,
ravens, Jays can do
similar
Animal Cognition
• Cognition: Ability to be aware
and make judgments about
your environment.
• Are nonhuman animals
cognitive?
– Conscious?
– Do they feel pain?
– Are they humiliated when we
dress them up?
• Are animals just computer
programs?
• They can’t think to the ability
we can
• Is this a question of degrees?
Cognitive ethology
• In Donald Griffins
Question of Animal
Awareness, he argued
that animals have
conscious minds like
those of humans.
• Jane Goodall (distantly
related to Mr. Chessman)
studied chimps, saw them
fake injuries to get
attention.
– Lying = thinking about
reality and other’s
perceptions of it
• Jay Gould of Harvard
reported bee’s forming
mental maps of foraging
areas
• Most people who spend
time with animals feel
that they can think.
• Implications about how
you view mankind’s
position in the world.
Rhythms
• Why do you sleep when you
do? How does your body
know to wake up?
– External or internal cues?
– Can you tell yourself to wake
up in 4 hours and do so?
• In controlled environments: all
light, all dark, or twilight
Humans have an internal clock
of around 25 hours
• What about long term things?
If you kept animals in
controlled environments for
years would they mate at the
same time as animals in the
wild?
Sleep
• No doc. Cases of human’s
dying directly from lack of
sleep.
– Maybe from sleep deprived
caused accidents
– Studies of people awake for
10 days shows temporary
decreases in cog. functions,
but nothing long term
– Microsleep
– Can lead to our ability to
metabolize glucose 
cause of diabetes
– Rats kept alive for 28 days
die.
Bags under eyes: Inheritable
Etiologies: bone structure, pigments, eye ailments, nutrition,
pregnancy, dehydration, circulation
Fatal Familial Insomnia
• 28 families have it
• Late onset Autosomal dominant:
50/50 chance of inheritance
• Mutates a protein into a prion
• Causes plaques on thalmus;
sleep responsible region
• Progression over 2 years: increasing
insomnia, odd phobias, panic attacks,
hallucinations, panic, agitation and
sweating, dementia, total insomnia and
sudden death after becoming mute.
Movement from external cues
• Kinesis: change in activity
rate in response to stim.
– “Cold” blooded animals
• Taxis: automatic
movement towards or
away from stim.
– Trout orient so they face
upstream
– Geotaxis: King crab larvae
orient down toward the earth
Migration
• How do gold plovers go
13,000 km from arctic to
S. America?
• How do birds find Hawaii
every year?
• Pilot from landmark to
landmark
• Orient yourself on a
straight line for the trip.
• Navigation  complex
mental mapping
• Animals navigate like
sailor from sun and stars
• Indigo Bunting orients
on North Star 
• Can they sense the
magnetic field?
• Magnetite a magnetic
mineral is found in
heads of some birds,
abdomens of some
bees
• Nothing’s been firmly
established