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Olive baboons grooming. In biology, altruism refers to behaviour by an individual that increases the fitness of another individual while decreasing their own. [ 1 ] Altruism in this sense is different from the philosophical concept of altruism, in which an action would only be called "altruistic" if it was done with the conscious intention of ...
Instinct is the inherent inclination of a living organism towards a particular complex behaviour, containing innate (inborn) elements.The simplest example of an instinctive behaviour is a fixed action pattern (FAP), in which a very short to medium length sequence of actions, without variation, are carried out in response to a corresponding clearly defined stimulus.
Ethology is a branch of zoology that studies the behaviour of non-human animals. It has its scientific roots in the work of Charles Darwin and of American and German ornithologists of the late 19th and early 20th century, including Charles O. Whitman, Oskar Heinroth, and Wallace Craig.
A taxis (from Ancient Greek τάξις (táxis) 'arrangement, order'; [ 1 ]pl.: taxes / ˈtæksiːz /) [ 2 ][ 3 ][ 4 ] is the movement of an organism in response to a stimulus such as light or the presence of food. Taxes are innate behavioural responses. A taxis differs from a tropism (turning response, often growth towards or away from a ...
Animal communication is a rapidly growing area of study in disciplines including animal behavior, sociology, neurology, and animal cognition. Many aspects of animal behavior, such as symbolic name use, emotional expression, learning, and sexual behavior, are being understood in new ways. When the information from the sender changes the behavior ...
Tinbergen's four questions, named after 20th century biologist Nikolaas Tinbergen, are complementary categories of explanations for animal behaviour. These are also commonly referred to as levels of analysis. [1] It suggests that an integrative understanding of behaviour must include ultimate (evolutionary) explanations, in particular:
Collective animal behavior. Collective animal behaviour is a form of social behavior involving the coordinated behavior of large groups of similar animals as well as emergent properties of these groups. This can include the costs and benefits of group membership, the transfer of information, decision-making process, locomotion and ...
Sociality is the degree to which individuals in an animal population tend to associate in social groups (gregariousness) and form cooperative societies. Sociality is a survival response to evolutionary pressures. [ 1 ] For example, when a mother wasp stays near her larvae in the nest, parasites are less likely to eat the larvae. [ 2 ]