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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:
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?
"Fixed action pattern" is an ethological term describing an instinctive behavioral sequence that is highly stereotyped and species-characteristic. [1] Fixed action patterns are said to be produced by the innate releasing mechanism, a "hard-wired" neural network, in response to a sign/key stimulus or releaser.
The rate (i.e. regression line) at which the animal decreases its acquisition or consumption of a resource as the cost increases is known as the elasticity of demand.A steep slope of decreasing access indicates a relatively low motivation for a resource, sometimes called 'high elasticity'; a shallow slope indicates relatively high motivation for a resource, sometimes called 'low elasticity ...
He believes the answer to this and many other questions is that people cannot help but think of objects as containing a sort of "essence" that can be influenced. [ 61 ] There is a difference between metaphysical essentialism and psychological essentialism, the latter referring not to an actual claim about the world but a claim about a way of ...
The novel object recognition (NOR) test is an animal behavior test that is primarily used to assess memory alterations in rodents. It is a simple behavioral test that is based on a rodents innate exploratory behavior. The test is divided into three phases: habituation, training/adaptation and test phase.
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 ...
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.