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The study of animal personality is largely based on the observation and investigation of behavioural traits. In an ecological context, traits or ‘characters’ are attributes of an organism that are shared by members of a species. Traits can be shared by all or only a portion of individuals in a population.
One of the most commonly recognized examples of tradition in animals is found in songbirds, in which the same song pattern is transmitted from generation to generation by vocal imitation. [100] Even "alien" syllable types not produced by their biological parents can be learned by finches raised by foster canaries in the lab.
The concept behind gene-culture coevolution is that, though culture plays a huge role in the progression of animal behavior over time, the genes of a particular species have the ability to affect the details of the corresponding culture and its ability to evolve within that species. [citation needed]
Many behaviors that are commonly thought of as spiteful are actually better explained as being selfish, that is benefiting the actor and harming the recipient, and true spiteful behaviors are rare in the animal kingdom. An example of spite is the sterile soldiers of the polyembryonic parasitoid wasp. A female wasp lays a male and a female egg ...
For example, several studies have shown that performance is better on, for example, a color discrimination (e.g. blue vs green) after the animal has learned another color discrimination (e.g. red vs orange) than it is after training on a different dimension such as an X shape versus an O shape. The reverse effect happens after training on forms.
Display behaviour is a set of ritualized behaviours that enable an animal to communicate to other animals (typically of the same species) about specific stimuli. [1] Such ritualized behaviours can be visual, but many animals depend on a mixture of visual, audio, tactical and chemical signals. [ 1 ]
It posits that subsequent selection might reinforce the originally learned behaviors, if adaptive, into more in-born, instinctive ones. Though this process appears similar to Lamarckism, that view proposes that living things inherited their parents' acquired characteristics. The Baldwin effect only posits that learning ability, which is ...
Each organism harbors traits, both anatomical and behavioural, of previous phylogenetic stages, since many traits are retained as species evolve. Reconstructing the phylogeny of a species often makes it possible to understand the "uniqueness" of recent characteristics: Earlier phylogenetic stages and (pre-) conditions which persist often also ...