Behavior Ethology Study of behavior Outline Behavior is

Behavior Ethology: Study of behavior

Outline • Behavior is what an animal does and how it does it • Behaviors have both ultimate and proximate causes • Certain stimuli trigger innate behaviors called fixed action patterns • Learning is experience based modification of behavior • Rhythmic behaviors sync. Activities with temporal changes in the environment • Environmental cues guide movement • Sociobiology places social behavior in an evolutionary context • Competitive social behaviors often represent contests for resources • Mating behavior relates directly to an animals fitness • Communication • Inclusive fitness can account for most altruistic behavior

Babies make noise when no one is around • Trying to fit their vocalizations to internal templates? • Eventually turn into complex sounds • Communication is the result of genetic cues modified during development by environmental factors • Bird song works like this too

Bird songs vs. calls • Long vs. Short, arbitrary distinction • Crows have more than 20 different calls • Ludwig van Beethoven, for example, included imitations of the Nightingale, Quail and Cuckoo in his Symphony No. 6 (the Pastoral). • Pink Floyd's 1969 albums More and Ummagumma

Behavior what an animal does and how it does it • Study of animal behavior is as old as we are. – Need it to hunt – Cave art a study of behavior? – Domestication: control of behavior

Early 1900 s – Ethology becomes formal discipline • Due to work of 3 ethologists – K. Lorenz studied waterfowl and other organisms – N. Tinbergen studied gulls and other organisms – K. Von Frisch studied communication in bees

Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution • Natural selection is going on so animals have to maximize their fitness – Recall fitness doesn’t exactly mean the strongest – How we feed – What mate we choose

Genetic component of behavior • If genes weren’t involved behavior wouldn’t be subject to natural selection and wouldn’t change over time • Genes set up the neural network that lets us learn. • Behavioral ecology: animals increase fitness by optimal behavior – Best explanation for the data

Studying genetic components of behavior • Can study twins: If Jacob is smart is Mack also? • Can study adoptees. If your real parents were alcoholics but your adopted parents are teetotalers what will you be? • Some example studies – Novelty seeking personality, ear wiggling, perfect pitch – propensity for smoking, Alcoholism, homosexuality – http: //www. ornl. gov/sci/techresour ces/Human_Genome/elsi/behavior. shtml#3 Not really twins, but hey.

• Lovebirds show innate behavior modified by experience

Behaviors have both ultimate and proximate causes • Ultimate cause: Why did this happen? • Ultimate causation - historical explanations • Explains why a behavior evolved • Study by measuring influence on survival or reproduction

• Proximate cause: How did this happen? • Proximate causation - immediate causes – Explains how behavior works - what stimulates behavior to occur – Study by measuring or describing the stimuli that elicit behavior – Internal - physiological events (hormones, nervous system) – External - environmental stimuli

Example - bird migration • Ultimate causes birds that migrate have a selective advantage over birds that don't/didn't, selected for over time, could be due to long term climate changes, glaciation, disease, taking advantage of food sources, etc. Proximate causes External stimulichanges in daylength Internal stimuli hormone levels

Components of Behavior • 2 Components – Nature/innate: instinct and genes determine behavior – Nurture/learned: experience and learning influence behavior – Two extremes are not mutually exclusive, but work together to influence behavior

Examples of innate behavior • egg ejection by cuckoos (brood parasites) • freezing behavior of nestling birds when exposed to silhouettes (raptors versus waterfowl)

Components of Innate Behavior • FAP - fixed action pattern, all or none response – Once started most animals will finish activity even if new stimuli show the activity to be inappropriate – Sign stimulus - causes release of FAP • Usually obvious aspect of morphology

Sticklebacks attack red

We’re sensitive to some stimuli more so than others • Frog’s are sensitive to movement of prey – Will starve if surrounded by dead/unmoving flies • Supernormal stimulus: artificial stimuli that elicit a stronger response – Oystercatchers will rather incubate a giant model of an egg instead of the real thing

Learned behavior • Learning: modification of behavior in response to specific experiences

Learning vs. Maturation • Doing something faster doesn’t mean you’ve learned • Experiment: they kept baby birds from flapping their wings until they should be old enough to fly and they flew normally and immeadiately.

Learning: Habituation • Loss of responsiveness to unimportant stimuli or stimuli that don’t provide appropriate feedback. • Banner blindness in web design

Imprinting • Lorenz’s study • Chuck Jones study • Salmon spawn back to stream of their birth from ocean; – Olfactory imprinting • Critical period: happens to young and adults

Conservation issues • minimize/eliminate human presence while raising California Condors

Classical conditioning • Associative learning: one stimulus goes with another, the roar goes with the lion • Pavlov married the concepts of feeding and the sound of a bell in his dog’s mind • Alpert Watson conditioned an 11 month old orphan named Alpert to fear rats • California Sea Slug has 20, 000 neurons but can be habituated, and sensitized • Method’s useful for dealing with phobias

Learned helplessness • Results from inescapable punishment • continued failure may inhibit somebody from experiencing agency • They tie a dog down and associate a shock with a sound. • Then in another situation when the dog can escape, they make the sound and it doesn’t try to move. • The dog had previously "learned" that nothing it did mattered.

Learned helplessness • people doing mental tasks in the presence of noise. • Given a switch that would turn off the noise, performance improved, even though subject rarely bothered to turn off the noise. • being aware of the ability to have control was enough to substantially counteract its distracting effect.

Evidence of optimism? • Not all of the dogs became helpless. • About 1/3 of the 150 dogs tried to find ways out of unpleasant experiences even if they previously had no control. I’m an optimistic Steeler Fan

Operant conditioning • Trial and error learning • B. F. Skinner’s Skinner Box: rat in box with lever. Push the lever & food comes out. It learns to push the lever. • Acetycholine is released through cerebral cortex as we try things • In nature: good / bad tastes – Remember genes tell us what will taste good and bad, we learn from there

Observational Learning • “watch me…” • Bandura’s Bobo doll experiment: kids who watched adults beat up doll also beat up doll. • Kid watched Beavis start a fire • Started fire • Cartoon makers are now careful to not create copyable behavior.

Play • Activity with no goal, but is similar to goal-directed behavior. • Risky behavior • “practice” hypothesis play = learning – But do they really get better? • “exercise” hypothesis – Fat babies aren’t going to bring home the bacon

Insight Learning • Getting it right the first time with no prior experience • Corvidae: Crows, ravens,

Animal Cognition • Cognition: Ability to be aware and make judgments about your environment. • Are nonhuman animals cognitive? – – Conscious? Do they feel pain? Anger? Fear? Sadness? Joy? Are they humiliated when we dress them up? • Are animals just computer programs? • They can’t think to the ability we can • Is this a question of degrees? • Flip the coin: If animals don’t have meaningful emotion and its all hardwired, are humans the same?

Cognitive ethology • In Donald Griffins Question of Animal Awareness, he argued that animals have conscious minds like those of humans. • Jane Goodall (distantly related to Mr. Chessman) studied chimps, saw them fake injuries to get attention. – Lying = thinking about reality and other’s perceptions of it

• Jay Gould of Harvard reported bee’s forming mental maps of foraging areas • Most people who spend time with animals feel that they can think. • Implications about how you view mankind’s position in the world.

Rhythms • Why do you sleep when you do? How does your body know to wake up? – External or internal cues? – Can you tell yourself to wake up in 4 hours and do so? • In controlled environments: all light, all dark, or twilight Humans have an internal clock of around 25 hours • What about long term things? If you kept animals in controlled environments for years would they mate at the same time as animals in the wild?

Sleep • No doc. Cases of human’s dying directly from lack of sleep. – Maybe from sleep deprived caused accidents – Studies of people awake for 10 days shows temporary decreases in cog. functions, but nothing long term – Microsleep – Can lead to our inability to metabolize glucose cause of diabetes – Rats kept alive for 28 days die. Bags under eyes: Inheritable Etiologies: bone structure, pigments, eye ailments, nutrition, pregnancy, dehydration, circulation

Fatal Familial Insomnia • 28 families have it • Late onset Autosomal dominant: 50/50 chance of inheritance • Mutates a protein into a prion • Causes plaques on thalmus; sleep responsible region • Progression over 2 years: increasing insomnia, odd phobias, panic attacks, hallucinations, panic, agitation and sweating, dementia, total insomnia and sudden death after becoming mute.

Movement from external cues • Kinesis: change in activity rate in response to stim. – “Cold” blooded animals • Taxis: automatic movement towards or away from stim. – Trout orient so they face upstream – Geotaxis: King crab larvae orient down toward the earth

Migration • How do gold plovers go 13, 000 km from arctic to S. America? • How do birds find Hawaii every year? • Pilot from landmark to landmark • Orient yourself on a straight line for the trip. • Navigation complex mental mapping • Animals navigate like sailor from sun and stars

• Indigo Bunting orients on North Star • Can they sense the magnetic field? • Magnetite a magnetic mineral is found in heads of some birds, abdomens of some bees • Nothing’s been firmly established