"Second to the right, and straight on till morning."
That, Peter told Wendy, was the way to Neverland; but even birds, carrying maps and consulting them at windy corners, could not have sighted it with these instructions.

-J. M. Barrie, Peter and Wendy

Nature and Nurture of Behavior
and complex and social animal behavior

Campbell Chapter 51

ANIMAL BEHAVIOR

Ethology..................................Comparative psychology
Europe.......................................America
Field...........................................Lab
Species-specific Evolution.........Albino (lab) Rats
birds, insects Development
courtship displays......................Learning
aggression
Innate (special learning)
reflex-taxis-FAP

Orientation
(Tropism - term now used for plants) Kinesis (amount of activation),
Taxis (directed orientation) - With paired sensory structure, orientation can be direct on the basis of spatial comparisons between, say, two antennae for male moth, while for a single structure, like your nose, you need to make temporal comparisons to orient toward increasing or decreasing stimulus intensity.
Pheromones (like hormones) [species specific chemical communication signals] sex attractants in moths
Sun compass orientation is even more complex
Examples of orientations in simple organisms - chemotaxis in E. coli, and mechanical avoidance in Paramecium

FAP (fixd action pattern) - is like a string of reflexes, is released by a releaser (stimulus) which can be presented by the researcher as a model (sign stimulus)
TRANSPARENCY 51.23 (sign stimuli & mating behavior)
Stickelback- long day - male becomes red bellied (Fig. 51.19)
Aggressive territorial - sign stimuli TRANSPARENCY Fig. 51.3 - release (releaser) FAP
Nest. Zig-zag dance. Female present
Eggs in nest, male fans

Learning - simple forms of learning include habituation - like where a cricket's pause in chirping upon hearing something, but if that noise is repeated, the pause gets briefer and briefer

Associative learning --- Classical conditioning- like Pavlov's dogs pair bell ringing with food and dog will salivate with just the bell

Watson (1930) Behaviorism "Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select." like the attitude in the George Bernard Shaw play Pygmalion which was the basis for the Broadway musical "My Fair Lady," and Thomas Jefferson's philosophy as expressed in the Declaration of Independence that "all men are created equal."

Operant (Instrumental) conditioning like in a Skinner box (named after the famous Harvard psychologist B. F. Skinner) where a food-deprived (hungry) rat will learn to press a bar for food - repeated pairings are necessary usually
reinforcements are positive (rewards) & negative (punishments)

vs. "one trial learning" where the animal is made sick, blue jay eat monarch butterfly (full of poisons from larva eating milk weed), and vomit SLIDE, Batesian mimicry - viceroy butterfly looks a little like a monarch but is not poisonous
SLIDE monarch and viceroy
toad eating a bee will be stung and avoid insects that look like that
Also rats avoid poison that way (this was covered earlier this semester, in digestion lecture)- only delayed action poisons (anticoagulant, Decon, WARFarin) work, rats are selective tasters because they cannot vomit, they have neophobia (won't eat much of a new taste) and if they get sick soon, will avoid that taste

Imprinting - a simple kind of learning
SLIDE Imprinting Fig. 51.9 geese learn to follow the famous ethologist (K. Lorenz, Nobel Prize 1973) if they see him early in life instead of their mother.
Some birds are precocial (develop quickly) like geese and ducks, and since they walk early, it is evolutionarly useful that they follow their mother, so there is one major synchronous learning event with a critical (sensitive) period right at that time

bird song TRANSPARENCY Fig. 51.5 sonogram of white crowned sparrow
Song birds are altricial (born helpless and develop slowly)
Male sings song when mature
10 - 50 days - "critical (sensitive) period" must hear the right song then researcher can isolate young bird from hearing his conspecifics singing.
Birds usually must practice their song, but then researcher can deafen the bird and it will still perform.
If you inject the female with testosterone, it will sing as the male sings.
Canary can keep adding syllables TRANSPARENCY (Fig. 51.10)
Dialects occur when all the birds do not get together, like cardinals (which winter over), - an example of "cultural" (vs. genetic inheritance)

navigation - a favorite topic in animal behavior
Monarch butterfly, live long, western monarks winter in Mexico
MIGRATION AND NAVIGATION TRANSPARENCY Fig. 51.15
Atlantic and Pacific golden plovers
TRANSPARENCY Fig. 51.16 transplant European starlings - to show that experienced birds can compensate while juveniles cannot.
Old birds know direction and location (=navigation), young only know direction.
Indigo buntings (Emlen's experiments in a planetarium) imprint on North Star; learn another if the stars are made to rotate around another star in the planetarium rather than around the North Star.
Pigeons seem to see arc for sun (vs. sun azimuth - projection of sun onto horizon), must know time of day (circadian rhythm to compare with Sun's position), and time of year (season, circannual rhythm to compare with plane of arc) to tell where it is.
Birds (and many other organisms) can use Earth's magnetic field (see sensory chapter)
Salmon imprint on stream odors and then return after 5 yrs. of foraging in ocean
Turtles - home to same beaches for breeding after being in sea at large

SOCIAL INSECTS - bees ants wasps termites
Queen reproductive female SLIDE workers attending queen
In bees, queen substance keep others immature (this is an example of a primer [vs. releaser] function of pheromones)
Workers are sterile females, first hivekeepers, then builders, then foragers
Drones are males only for reproduction
If queen substance is low, then new Queen is made by feeding larvae with royal jelly
Dance - round dance for food nearby von Frisch (1973 Nobel Prize)- 51.27 TRANSPARANCY
waggle dance direction and distance- communicate based on anble from Sun azimuth to food with hive at angle, relative to vertical in honeycomb in hive.

Aggression - Agonistic behavior
SLIDE cheetah and Thompson's gazelle - serengetti
Animals not kill eachother, people do
(exceptions include infanticide - evolution)
Ritual displays instead of real fighting- snake wrestling Fig. 51.19 example
Threat to avoid fighting baboon yawns to show canine teeth, aggressive postures (dog)
Submissive -postures (to "give up") in dog
Appeasement gestures- present genitals in baboons
In social groups-Dominance hierarchy (pecking order in hens)
Alpha male in wolves
Territoriality - fighting is averted, owner wins Fig. 51.21 (nests of gannets spread evenly)
Territory is marked, for instance by pheromones (Fig. 51.22) cheetah urine marking
olfaction - dog can find one person in 10 not in scent
dog urine marking

Lorenz (Nobel prize - people kill because communication is faulty READ QUOTE from "On Aggression"

The distance at which shooting weapons take effect screens the killer against the stimulus situation which would otherwise activate his killing inhibitions. The deep, emotional layers of our personality simply do not register the fact that the crooking of the forefinger to release a shot tears the entrails of another man. No sane man would even go rabbit hunting for pleasure if the necessity of killing his prey with his natural weapons brought home to him the full, emotional realization of what he is actually doing.

To regard man, the most ephemeral and rapidly evolving of all species, as the final and unsurpassable achievement of creation, especially in his present-day particularly dangerous and disagreeable stage of development, is certainly the most arrogant and dangerous of all untenable doctrines. If I thought of man as the final image of God, I should not know what to think of God. But when I consider that our ancesters, at a time fairly recent in relation to earth's history, were perfectly ordinary apes, closely related to chimpanzees, I see a glimmer of hope. It does not require considerable optimism to assume that from us human beings something better and higher may evolve. Far from seeing in man the irrevocable and unsurpassable image of God, I assert--more modestly and, I believe, in greater awe of the Creation and its infinite possibilities--that the long-sought missing link between animals and the really humane being is ourselves!

If, on the other hand, we are powerless against the pathological disintegration of our social structure, and if, armed with atomic weapons, we cannot control our aggressive behavior any more sensibly than any animal species, this deplorable situation is largely due to our arrogant refusal to regard our own behavior as subject to the laws of nature and as accessible to causal analysis.

SLIDES pertaining to territoriality and aggression
SLIDE Thompson's gazelle marking pheromone from face gland
SLIDE Cheetah urine marking (like male dogs do)
SLIDE Cheetah hunting Thompson's gazelle
SLIDE wolves hunt moose Isle Royale
SLIDE musk ox group defense

(*see further notes at bottom of this outline) SLIDES on the social life of the baboon - Papio anubis
SLIDE African savanah - home range - migrate - troop
yawn threat SLIDE
troops - dominant males - protect.
SLIDE females with infants
SLIDE grooming ("originally" to remove parasites, becomes predominant social behavior and involved in communicating social hierarchy

E.O.Wilson - 1975 - Sociobiology
behavior subject to evolution like morphology
Richard Dawkins' best selling book The Selfish Gene - "An organism is DNA's way of making more DNA"
then how can there be altruism?
Ground squirrel giving alarm call - kin selection Fig. 51.28
Great example of altruism in bees (also communication)
Safety in numbers - Passenger pigeon - studied by Audubon - went extinct when numbers declined
Here is a SLIDE I took at the Smithsonian natural history museum of Martha, the last passenger pigeon who died 1 pm Sept 1, 1914 at the Cincinnatti Zoo.

Nature - nurture : very controversial
Darwin was followed by Galton who applied these principles to intelligence and founded eugenics (how can we improve mankind by genetics)
Is there a way to measure native ability?
1969 IQ Jensen "how much can we boost IQ"
IQ test is standardized - Mean 100, S.D. 15
normal, bell-curve
68% is plus or minus 1 standard deviation, 96% is +/- 2 SD's
Quantitative genetics polygenic (vs Mendelian)
Variances
Vp = Vh + Ve + covariance + interaction + error
phenotypic, heretitary, environmental
Identical twins raised apart - correlation should be Vh/Vp and it comes to 80%. Burt produced correlation coefficients that were the same to the third decimal point despite increasing numbers of twins added to the study. His data were destroyed and cannot be examined. Was he a racist? Did he cheat? His coauthors could not be found.
Letter to the editor in Science (Dec. 24, 1976, p. 1377, I. Phillips. The "case" of Sir Cyril Burt
Blacks IQ average is 85, but is there cultural bias in test?
Many years ago, Morton measured cranial capacities of different races by filling skulls with beans and counting them, but did he cheat?

Instinct
Babies - suck even before birth SLIDE
grasp SLIDE, 7 mo (This slide and slides below are from I. Eibl-Eibesfeldt, Ethology, The biology of Behavior, 1970
smiling, looking cute (Blind baby smiles at mother) SLIDE
Cross cultural - laugh, greetings
Eyebrow greeting Bali, New Guinea SLIDE
SLIDE wave greeting
SLIDE smiling when happy
SLIDE 36 hour old infant can quickly learn to imitate happy, sad (pout), surprise (Science 218, 1982, 179-181

There are famous studies of chimpanzees in the wild by Jane Goodall and of gorillas in the wild by George Schaller. Here I choose to emphasize baboon behavior.

*Further notes on baboons, e.g. from S.L.Washburn and I.DeVore, the social life of baboons, Scientific American, June 1961
Royal Nairobi park in Kenya
Baboons also not so aggressive - zoos increase
aggressiveness
Impala and gazelle - smell & hearing, baboons - sight
Baboon troops 10 - 200 ave=40
adult male 70 lb females half size. infants
juveniles 18 mo - 4 yrs - away from mother
vegetarian mostly, grass, rub grit off, eat ant galls
several troops may meet at water hole - not mix
open plain - spread out. Poor visibility - close
Acacia - fever trees - food
sleep in fever trees. cannot go over 2 mi from sleeping tree
Infant cling stays with mother females groom mother
infant and mother near big males Protective
births at beginning of rainy season
ride belly early
3-4 mi/day. Infants w/ mother nursing about 9 mo not mate
not share food so juvenile learns to eat alone
Important play. mounting. fighting. dominance
play quietly, male nearby
male dominance
cheetahs hunt in day
adult males bark when near male
Consort pair. No fighting over females in estrus
1 wk of ea mo except for pregnancy & lactation
presenting prelude to grooming
sometimes gang up.
sometimes displace tension by chase 3rd

SLU offers an Animal Behavior course (BL A436) taught by Dr. Nordell

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