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Abnormal behaviour in animals can be defined in several ways. Statistically , abnormal is when the occurrence, frequency or intensity of a behaviour varies statistically significantly , either more or less, from the normal value.
Behavioral ecology, also spelled behavioural ecology, is the study of the evolutionary basis for animal behavior due to ecological pressures. Behavioral ecology emerged from ethology after Niko Tinbergen outlined four questions to address when studying animal behaviors: What are the proximate causes, ontogeny, survival value, and phylogeny of a behavior?
Habituation is a simple form of learning and occurs in many animal taxa. It is the process whereby an animal ceases responding to a stimulus. Often, the response is an innate behavior. Essentially, the animal learns not to respond to irrelevant stimuli.
Vigilance is an important behaviour during foraging as animals must often venture away from the safety of shelter to find food. However, being vigilant comes at the expense of time spent feeding, so there is a trade-off between the two. The length of time animals devote to vigilance is dependent on many factors including predation risk and hunger.
Foraging theory is a branch of behavioral ecology that studies the foraging behavior of animals in response to the environment where the animal lives. Behavioral ecologists use economic models and categories to understand foraging; many of these models are a type of optimal model.
Shimmering behaviour of Apis dorsata (giant honeybees). A group of animals fleeing from a predator shows the nature of herd behavior, for example in 1971, in the oft-cited article "Geometry for the Selfish Herd", evolutionary biologist W. D. Hamilton asserted that each individual group member reduces the danger to itself by moving as close as possible to the center of the fleeing group.
Environmental enrichment can improve the overall welfare of animals in captivity and create a habitat similar to what they would experience in their wild environment. It aims to maintain an animal's physical and psychological health by increasing the range or number of species-specific behaviors, increasing positive interaction with the captive environment, preventing or reducing the frequency ...
Behaviorism is a term that also describes the scientific and objective study of animal behavior, usually referring to measured responses to stimuli or trained behavioral responses in a laboratory context, without a particular emphasis on evolutionary adaptivity.