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ANIMAL BEHAVIOR
37.1 Behavioral biologists study the
actions of animals in their natural
environments
• Behavioral biology is the study of what animals
do when interacting with their environment
• Behavior can be interpreted in terms of
proximate causes, or immediate interaction with
the environment
Instinctive vs. Learned
• Instincts: Stereotyped behavior that is
triggered by a specific stimuli. Unlearned.
Preprogrammed. Fixed Action pattern.
• Learned: behaviors that require interaction
from the environment
37.2 Behavior results from both
genes and environmental factors
• Animal behavior often involves a combination
of genetic programming (innate behavior) and
environmental experiences (learning)
• In biology, the nature-versus-nurture debate is
not about either/or
– It is about how both the genes and the environment
influence the development of phenotypic traits
37.3 Instinct—Not learned
Fixed Action patterns
• Sign stimuli trigger innate, essentially
unchangeable fixed action patterns (FAPs)
– A sign stimulus is often a simple clue in an animal’s
environment
• The genetic programming underlying FAPs
ensures that such activities are performed
correctly without practice
– Such as many parent-offspring interactions
• The graylag goose always
retrieves an egg that has
been bumped out of her
nest in the same manner
– This is a fixed action
pattern
– She carries this sequence to
completion, even if the egg
slips away during the
process
Figure 37.3A
– The behavior of the
cuckoo hatchling
ejecting the host
eggs from the nest
– The feeding
behavior of a foster
mother to the
cuckoo chick
Figure 37.3B
Imprinting: Who’s
your Mommy?
• “Window
Learning”
• The recognition
of some object as
“mother” during
a critical window
after birth
• It’s “instinctive”
to imprint upon
hatching, but
what you imprint
on is “learned”
37.4 Learning ranges from simple behavioral
changes to complex problem solving
• Learning is a change in behavior resulting from
experience
• Habituation is one of the simplest forms of
learning
– An animal learns not to respond to a repeated
stimulus that conveys little or no information
– For example, birds eventually become habituated to
scarecrows and no longer avoid nearby fruit trees
– Temporary modification of decreased
responsiveness
Classical Conditioning
aka: Associative learning
• Tap on fish tank & feed fish
• They learn to associate tap with food
• Unconditioned stimulus elicits an
unconditioned response
• neutral stimulus introduced to elicit the
unconditioned response it becomes the
conditioned stimulus
Classical Conditioning
Pavlov’s Dog
Operant conditioning
• is learning that a particular stimulus or response is
linked to a reward or punishment
– These ducks have
learned to associate
humans with food
handouts
– They congregate
rapidly whenever
a person approaches
the shoreline
Insight Learning/Reasoning
• Some animals exhibit problem-solving
behavior
– Examples: chimpanzees and ravens
Skinner Box
Identify
• Dog bring newspapers into house every night, gets
a bone
• Bird treats human it saw when 1st born as mother
• Frog squeezes swollen belly of female to release
eggs
• Coakroach runs from light because every time
light turns on someone tries to kill it
• Man wished to turn screw, has no screwdriver,
uses edge of knife as substitute
• Cat runs to kitchen for food when hears can
opener
• Bird puffs up bright color feathers looking for
mate
Intraspecific Interactions
• Behavioral Displays
– Signals for communication
– Bird call
– Tail wag
• Pecking Order
– Dominance hierarchy
• Territoriality
• Behavioral cycles
– Circadian rhythms control daily cycles of
eating, sleep