ETHOLOGY

Ethology
 Ethology is the scientific study of
animal behavior considered as a branch
of zoology. A scientist who practices
ethology is called an ethologist

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Founding fathers of the
study of animal behaviour

Konrad Lorenz

Fred Skinner
Niko Tinbergen
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Ethology
 The understanding of the animal world is a
rapidly growing field, and even in the 21st
century so far, many prior understandings
related to diverse fields such as
animal communication, personal symbolic
name use, animal emotions, animal culture
and learning, and even sexual conduct, long
thought to be well understood, have been
revolutionized, along with new fields such as
neuroethology which have been opened up.
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Origins of the name
 The term “ethology” the Greek language, as ethos
(ήθος) is the Greek word for "custom".
 Other words that derive from the Greek word "ethos"
are: "ethics" and "ethical."
 The term was first popularised in English by the
American myrmecologist William Morton Wheeler in
1902.
 An earlier, slightly different sense of the term was
proposed by John Stuart Mill in his 1843 System of
Logic. He recommended the development of a new
science, "ethology," whose purpose would be the
explanation of individual and national differences in
character, on the basis of associationistic psychology.

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Differences and similarities
with comparative psychology
Ethology can be contrasted with
comparative psychology, which also studies
animal behaviour, but construes its study as a
branch of psychology
Comparative psychology sees the study of
animal behaviour in the context of what is
known about human psychology, ethology
sees the study of animal behaviour in the
context of what is known about animal
anatomy and physiology.

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Differences and similarities
with comparative psychology
 Early comparative psychologists
concentrated on the study of learning,
and thus tended to look at behaviour in
artificial situations
 Early ethologists concentrated on
behaviour in natural situations, tending
to describe it as instinctive.

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Differences and similarities
with comparative psychology
 The two approaches are
complementary rather than competitive,
but they do lead to different
perspectives and sometimes to conflicts
of opinion about matters of substance
 The twentieth century comparative
psychology developed most strongly in
North America, while ethology was
stronger in Europe

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Differences and similarities
with comparative psychology
 A practical difference is that
comparative psychologists concentrated
on gaining extensive knowledge of the
behaviour of very few species, while
ethologists were more interested in
gaining knowledge of behaviour in a
wide range of species, not least in order
to be able to make principled
comparisons across taxonomic groups.

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Differences and similarities
with comparative psychology
 Ethologists have made much more use
of a truly comparative method than
comparative psychologists ever have.

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Darwinism and the
beginnings of ethology

 Because ethology is understood as

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Darwinism and the
beginnings of ethology
 However, he pursued his interest in
behaviour by encouraging his protégé
George Romanes, who investigated animal
learning and intelligence using an
anthropomorphic method that did not gain
scientific support.
 The early ethologists, such as Oskar Heinroth
and Julian Huxley instead concentrated on
behaviours that can be called instinctive, or
natural, in that they occur in all members of a
species under specified circumstances

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Darwinism and the
beginnings of ethology
 Their first step in studying the behaviour of a
new species was to construct an ethogram, a
description of the main types of natural
behaviour with their frequencies of
occurrence.
 This approach provided an objective,
cumulative base of data about behaviour,
which subsequent researchers could check
and build on, and as a way of building a
science of behaviour, it proved much more
fruitful

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The fixed action pattern and
animal communication
 An important step, associated with the name
of Konrad Lorenz though probably due more
to his teacher, Heinroth, was the identification
of fixed action patterns (FAPs).
 Lorenz popularized FAPs as instinctive
responses that would occur reliably in the
presence of identifiable stimuli (called sign
stimuli or releasing stimuli).

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The fixed action pattern and
animal communication
 These FAPs could then be compared
across species, and the similarities and
differences between behaviour
compared with the similarities and
differences in morphology (biology) on
which taxonomy was based.
 An important and much quoted study of
the Anatidae (ducks and geese) by
Heinroth used this technique.

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The fixed action pattern and
animal communication
 The ethologists noted that the stimuli that
released FAPs were commonly features of
the appearance or behaviour of other
members of their own species, and they were
able to show how important forms of
animal communication could be mediated by
a few simple FAPs
 The most sophisticated investigation of this
kind was the study by Karl von Frisch of the
so-called “dance language” underlying
bee communication.

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Imprinting
 A second important finding of Lorenz concerned the
early learning of young nidifugous birds, a process he
called imprinting
 Lorenz observed that the young of birds such as
geese and chickens spontaneously followed their
mothers from almost the first day after they were
hatched, and he discovered that this following
response could be transferred to an arbitrary stimulus
if the eggs were incubated artificially and the stimulus
was presented during a critical period (now called a
sensitive period) that covered the few days after
hatching.

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Imprinting
 The concept of imprinting has been
widely adopted in
developmental psychology.

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Tinbergen's four questions
for ethologists
Lorenz’s collaborator, Niko Tinbergen, argued
that ethology always needed to pay attention to
four kinds of explanation of any instance of
behaviour:
1. Function: how does the behaviour impact
on the animal’s chances of survival and
reproduction?
2 Causation: what are the stimuli that elicit the
response, and how has it been modified by
recent learning?

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Tinbergen's four questions
for ethologists
3.Development: how does the behaviour
change with age, and what early
experiences are necessary for the
behaviour to be shown?
4. Evolutionary history: how does the
behaviour compare with similar
behaviour in related species, and how
might it have arisen through the process
of phylogeny?

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The flowering of ethology
 Through the work of Lorenz and Tinbergen,
ethology developed strongly in continental
Europe in the years before World War II.
 After the war, Tinbergen moved to the
University of Oxford, and ethology became
stronger in the UK, with the additional
influence of William Thorpe, Robert Hinde
and Patrick Bateson at the Sub-department of
Animal Behaviour of the
University of Cambridge, located in the village
of Madingley. In this period, too, ethology
began to develop strongly in North America

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The flowering of ethology
 Lorenz, Tinbergen, and von Frisch were
jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in 1973
for their work in developing ethology

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Social ethology and recent
developments
 In 1970, the English ethologist John H. Crook
published an important paper in which he
distinguished comparative ethology from
social ethology, and argued that much of the
ethology that had existed so far was really
comparative ethology, looking at animals as
individuals, whereas in the future, ethologists
would need to concentrate on the behaviour
of social groups of animals and the social
structure within them
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Social ethology and recent
developments
 This was prescient. E. O. Wilson’s book
‘’Sociobiology’’ appeared in 1975, and since
that time the study of behaviour has been
much more concerned with social aspects. It
has also been driven by the stronger, but
more sophisticated, Darwinism associated
with Wilson and Richard Dawkins
 The related development of behavioral
ecology has also helped transform ethology.

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Social ethology and recent
developments
 At the same time a substantial
rapprochement with comparative
psychology has occurred, so the
modern scientific study of behaviour
offers a more or less seamless
spectrum of approaches, from animal
cognition, more traditional comparative
psychology, ethology, sociobiology and
behavioural ecology

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Hailman's experiment on development of pecking preference
in young herring gulls
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Development of bird song

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Summary of Development
of bird song
 Marler's experiments clearly show the interaction
between innate and environmental factors.
 Sparrows have dialects.
 Isolated birds show deficiencies in their song but it
does contain elements of adult song. Marler believes
this is because bird is born with a template of what
their species song sounds like.
 Isolated birds can only produce this crude template
song.
 The song of a deafened bird is even cruder.
 Normal birds adjust their song to what it hears from
adults in the vicinity.

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Maturation and practice of
pecking by chicks

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