Animal Behavior: Understanding Instincts and Social Patterns

Posted on Dec 17, 2024 in Psychology and Sociology

Animal behavior describes how species relate to their environment or stimulus world. Animal behavior can be conscious or unconscious, voluntary or involuntary, public or private, depending on the circumstances that affect it. Conduct is the reaction of a living organism to a stimulus, internal or external.

Behavior is the neuromuscular reaction of a living being to a stimulus. The existence of a nervous system is necessary for this. Ethology (from the Greek ethos = habit) is the science that unites biology and experimental psychology, studying animal behavior in the wild or under laboratory conditions.

Ethologists study the distinctive features of the behavior of a particular animal population and how it evolves over time.

In some cases, human studies may also join the field of study of ethology (human ethology).

This science focuses on the study of animal behavior, instinct, and the discovery of patterns that guide the activity of innate or learned behaviors in different animal species.

Main Attitudes of Behavioral Studies in Ethology

  • Aggressiveness
  • Mating
  • Social life
  • Imprinting
  • Territoriality

Key Questions in Ethology

  • Why behave this way and not another?
  • In what form does this behavior contribute to the conservation of the species?
  • What selective advantage does it offer to the animal? (Relationship with Ecology)
  • How does a certain behavior develop?

Instinct vs. Learning

Instinct: Hereditary behavioral guideline (inheritable genetic component).

Learning: Unlike instinct, these are behaviors acquired by the individual.

However, none of these approaches alone succeeds in giving a complete response to animal behavior.

Pioneers of Ethology

Konrad Lorenz (1903-1989)

  • Austrian zoologist, founder of Ethology
  • Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (1973), with Karl von Frisch and Niko Tinbergen
  • “Many animal and human tendencies are based on latent genetic patterns that are triggered by environmental events.”
  • Ethological studies with Anatidae: Imprinting
  • Fixed action patterns

Karl von Frisch (1886-1982)

  • German zoologist
  • Awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine (1973), along with Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen
  • Studied the social behavior of bees:
    • Use of light for orientation
    • Methods of communication

Nikolaas Tinbergen (1907-1988)

  • Born in Holland
  • Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (1973), with Karl von Frisch and Konrad Lorenz
  • Established the value of the stimulus as a sign and considered that instincts were based on hierarchically organized neural systems

Instinctive behaviors are inherited, downplaying the influence of the environment. In the United States during the first half of this century, an investigation of animal behavior focused on learned behaviors in controlled media. These investigations resulted in comparative psychology and behaviorism.

Tinbergen’s Four Questions of Ethology

In the book The Study of Instinct, Niko Tinbergen exposes the four questions on which ethology is based: causal, developmental (or ontogenetic), evolutionary, and phylogenetic. He is responsible for making a distinction between comparative psychology and ethology.

Causal

Tries to find the direct cause of behavior.

Two dichotomies exist:

  • Internal cause / External cause
  • Hardware model / Software model

Developmental

Also known as ontogenetic, it is responsible for discriminating within the lifetime of an animal when a behavior appears, why it appears, and behavioral maturation.

For example, the case of a bird, which implements the behavior of flying again after a while, or the case of hatching behavior. Why is there this level of development? These are questions that ethology seeks to answer.

Evolutionary

Evolutionary attempts to answer what benefits the animal gets from a behavior and what evolutionary advantages it had to be selected. For example, what evolutionary advantage does a hen get to care for her offspring and not abandon them?

Phylogenetic

Tries to answer the question, “When did that behavior appear in the evolutionary history of the species?”

Basic Concepts in Ethology

  • Signal stimuli (also called a sign stimulus, key, releasing, or trigger)
  • Fixed action patterns (or fixed patterns of behavior)
  • Innate releasing mechanism

Signal Stimulus

The object that triggers the activation of a fixed pattern of action. It’s like a switch that turns on a genetically determined program (Herrick, 1908; Tinbergen, 1951).

Example: Feeding chicks of gulls of the genus Larus.

To recognize the reactions of an animal, one must know the capabilities of its sensory organs.

For example:

  • Bees: Ultraviolet Light
  • Bats: Ultrasound
  • Sharks: Electric fields
  • Snakes: Ultraviolet Radiation and Temperature Difference
  • Some birds (robins): Earth’s magnetic field

These stimuli trigger a specific signal behavior in the individual.

Fixed Action Patterns

Recognizable and constant movements that the animal does not need to learn and that, like bodily characteristics, are distinctive characteristics of the species and instinct.

Example: Lorenz (1939) observed that when a goose saw an egg out of its nest, it unleashed an instinctive program to recover it. Or, in the example above, by stimulating the peak of the mother, the gull regurgitates to feed the chicks.

Innate Releasing Mechanism

Responsible for the connection between the signal stimulus and fixed action patterns. Hypothetical internal structures would be connected on the one hand to the sense organs of the animal and, on the other hand, to target organs. They filter stimuli selectively (when and where to run the response to stimuli).

Its shape or character is unknown; only how it acts is known.

Instinct

“Hierarchically organized nervous mechanism, sensitive to certain premonitory urges, triggers and directors, both internally and externally, and responds to stimuli with coordinated movements that contribute to the maintenance of the individual and the species.” – Tinbergen (1951)

Hierarchy: When and how to respond to the same stimulus.

Example: Hungry cat linear ordering (stalk, approach, catch, kill, devour).

Instinct: Preprogrammed Learning

Many animal organisms are designed to learn specific skills at certain times in their lives.

Young birds follow a stimulus presented to them immediately after they hatch (Lorenz).

The object must be moving. It must appear within 24 hours after leaving the egg; this was called the critical period. It is an irreversible process once done (imprinting).

Imprinting

The process by which young adults identify with their own kind and learn from them by observing and imitating the methods for finding food, shelter, security, and all that entails learning for survival, including aggressive behavior, submissive behavior, mating, defense, etc.

  • Importance of the first hours of life (most sensitive)
  • Imprinting also occurs in captive animals
  • Possible to avoid contact with humans
  • Stimulating innate animal behavior

Animal Welfare

Animal welfare is a subject of public interest, complex and multifaceted, including important aspects of scientific, ethical, value-based, trade-economic, and political considerations. Avoiding the stress of handling or maintenance in captivity is crucial. Animal health requires meeting the physical, social, and ethological needs of animals; therefore, animal welfare issues and their costs are the responsibility of everyone involved.

In the public debate in developed countries, issues such as containment and treatment of animals from the farm to the time of slaughter are becoming increasingly important.

This has led to systematic criticism from environmental groups, which have significantly affected the perception of consumers on the subject. It is they who, citing environmental ethics, not only have changed their eating habits but have also developed, in many cases, a tendency to buy animal products whose production process involves a high degree of respect and good treatment of animals.

The adoption of this concept on the part of consumers suggests that it is in the presence of a new attribute value, which significantly affects their purchase decision. On the other hand, consumer preferences for products with high animal welfare standards have led to commercial agents of the food chain to meet this demand with new techniques in production, trade, and marketing in line with these new trends.

Thus, in recent times, the emergence of alternative markets for products that encourage livestock production with a high degree of animal welfare has been seen. A clear indication of this new trend is the increase in various European countries of pig production and cattle raised extensively, i.e., the animals are no longer confined but are bred in large spaces and under similar environmental conditions to their natural conditions.

The first global conference on animal welfare (Paris, 2004), attended by national technical institutions, universities, research centers, civil society, and the business sector, reinforced the importance of the topic, with topics such as:

  • Land and sea transport
  • Slaughtering animals for human consumption
  • Disease control

In Chile, the Agricultural and Livestock Service (SAG) is in charge of overseeing these issues (domestic and wild species).

Feeding Behavior

  • Related to eating habits
  • Different techniques for the same purpose
  • Social animals commonly use group feeding strategies (cooperation)
  • It is common that there is a hierarchy in feeding scavengers and carnivores (intra- and inter-species)

Reproductive Behavior

Includes all activities that promote production and rearing:

  • Mating behavior
  • Aggressive behavior directed at obtaining a partner
  • Parental feeding behavior and reproduction of offspring
  • Periodicity

Conduct of males and females are different:

  • Sperm are smaller (lower metabolic expenditure, higher reproductive potential)
  • Females are more concerned with feeding and breeding
  • However, there are exceptions
  • Monogamy
  • Polygamy (polygyny, polyandry, promiscuity)

Forms of parental care:

  • Before birth
  • After birth
  • After nutritional independence
  • Help children mature
  • Sexual dimorphism
  • Courtship (marked in birds)

Selected characteristics, of course, aim to increase reproductive capacity (attracting more and more couples).

Social Behavior

Advantages of group living:

  • Ensure fertilization and genetic exchange.
  • Protection from weather conditions.
  • Protection against predators. Temporary groups (migration) or groups for life (schools of herring). They are protected by the confounding effect.
  • Feeding (hunting).
  • Protection of offspring (family).
  • Division of labor (social insects).
  • Ability to convey experience and knowledge to other members of the species more quickly than from one generation to another.

In solitary animals, males and females are found only in the mating season; the female cares for the young, e.g., felines. There are also conformations of harems (camelids), family groups (meerkats, baboons), aggregates (fish), as well as complex systems of castes (social insects). Generally characterized by aggression, which, according to Lorenz, is only between individuals of the same species (different from predation, anti-predation, and competition).

Example: In the cat, predation is manifested in the crouching attitude and quiet, while the exhibit aggressive fight or flight is to hiss, tonnage bristling, and lumbar.

  • Dominance and subjugation (territory, females, food, breeding place)

Migration

It occurs mainly in birds but also in other species. The goal is to lengthen the reproductive period, seeking new territories. It is in part a genetic conditioning and partly acquired.

Location by:

  • Sun
  • Magnetic Fields
  • Stars
  • Geomorphology landscape

Anti-predator Behavior

Evolution of social behavior to develop certain species in order to reduce the chances of being eaten. It is mainly found in species more prone to attack by predators.