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A well known example of unintentional opportunity providing is the transmission of feeding behavior in black rats (Rattus rattus). One pilot study determined that black rats living in the forests of Palestine preferentially fed on pine cones instead of other fresh fruits and vegetation nearby.
Instinctive drift is the tendency of an animal to revert to instinctive behaviors that can interfere with learned responses. The concept originated with Keller and Marian Breland when they taught a raccoon to put coins into a box. The raccoon drifted to its instinctive behavior of rubbing the coins with its paws, as it would do when foraging ...
Prior to these findings, opponents to the idea of animal culture had argued that the behaviors being called cultural were simply behaviors that had evolutionarily evolved due to their importance to survival. After the identification of this initial non-evolutionarily advantageous evidence of culture, scientists began to find differences in ...
In populations that do, it’s a learned behavior, with mothers teaching the strategy to calves. Nobody really knows why some do and some don’t but competition for food probably led to a new ...
The ability for socially-learned behaviors to stabilize across generations is also mitigated by the complexity of the behavior. Different individuals of a species, like crows, vary in their ability to use a complex tool. Finally, a behavior's stability in animal culture depends on the context in which they learn a behavior.
Most behaviors which are both fixed action patterns and occur in more complex animals, are usually essential to the animal's fitness, or in which speed (i.e. an absence of learning) is a factor. [6] For instance, the greylag goose's egg-retrieval behavior is so essential to the survival of its chicks that the fitness of the parent bird is ...
Cultural behavior must involve the use of artifacts. The most famous example in the animal world is the termite stick. Some chimpanzees in Tanzania have learned to fish termites out of their nests using sticks. They select a stick and modify it to fit down an opening in a termite nest, insert it, wiggle it around and withdraw it, eating the ...
Social grooming is a behavior in which social animals, ... action that is learned from an ... feedback mechanism for social behaviors. [64] For example, ...