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The tabulated schema is used as the central organizing device in many animal behaviour, ethology, behavioural ecology and evolutionary psychology textbooks (e.g., Alcock, 2001). One advantage of this organizational system, what might be called the "periodic table of life sciences," is that it highlights gaps in knowledge, analogous to the role ...
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?
The latter include abiotic and biotic factors. Abiotic factors such as temperature or light conditions have dramatic effects on animals, especially if they are ectothermic or nocturnal. Biotic factors include members of the same species (e.g. sexual behavior), predators (fight or flight), or parasites and diseases. [12]
With animal training it is often questioned if the training and shaping is the cause of a behaviour exhibited by an animal (nurture), or if the behaviour is actually innate to the species (nature). [ 9 ] [ 10 ] Instinctive drift centers around the nature of behaviour more so than learning being the sole cause of a behaviour.
Evidence for animal culture is often based on studies of feeding behaviors, [8] vocalizations, [4] predator avoidance, [9] mate selection, [10] and migratory routes. [11] An important area of study for animal culture is vocal learning, the ability to make new sounds through imitation. [4] Most species cannot learn to imitate sounds.
However, if the animal encounters prey 2, it should reject it to look for a more profitable prey 1, unless the time it would take to find prey 1 is too long and costly for it to be worth it. Thus, the animal should eat prey 2 only if E 2 /h 2 > E 1 /(h 1 +S 1), where S 1 is the search time for prey 1.
This behavior is shown by an ant who has located a food source in order to guide a naive ant to the desired location. The leading ant only continues the tandem run if the following ant frequently taps on the leader's body, showing that the leader (teacher) modifies its behavior in the presence of the naive follower.
Oriental small-clawed otters captive in zoos often beg, but in one study, it was found that when begging from visitors to the zoo, they only begged from those wearing blue shirts in the same shade as that worn by the keepers. [42] In the same study, the environment was manipulated to test whether "boredom" or "hunger" was the primary causal factor.