Animal Behaviour Basics

One of the major drives of an animal's life is to find a mate and ensure the survival of the species through creating offspring. There are many different ways that animals find mates. Some sing, some dance, some decorate homes, some even change gender depending on what is needed! This week will look at courtship of mainly birds - displays that you will probably have seen before on Attenborough's shows. http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/adaptations/Courtship_display Take a look at the link above. It contains videos of courtship behaviours, like the frigate bird's song and belly, designed to attract a mate. Most of these birds show evidence of sexual dimorphism - when the two genders of a bird look different. An example of this in the UK is the blackbird.  Typically, the gender that is less showy is the chooser and the more showy is designed to attract a mate. In most animal species, the males tend to be the more showy (think: peacock) and the females tend to be ch...

Burrhus Skinner (more commonly known as B.F Skinner) was an American scientist who held the post of Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology at Harvard university from 1958-1974. Skinner considered free will an illusion and said that human action depended on consequences of previous actions, but it is the Skinner box that he created in the 30s that we will look at in depth.  Skinner designed his operant conditioning box to study behaviour training by teaching an animal to respond to stimuli. He tried to strengthen behaviour responses through both positive and negative reinforcements.  Your task this week is to really consider the ethics behind animal behaviour studies, focusing on Skinner's box. To do this, you need to research the Skinner box, how it works and the research outcomes it can generate. It may be easy here to list lots of negatives, but remember that you must include positives as well. Write the summary of your thoughts in the comments section below. ...

Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov is one of the most famous animal behaviourists as a result of his conditioning work with dogs. He was the first Russian Nobel laureate, winning the Nobel Prize in 1904.  Pavlov's work on dogs focused on conditioning - 'a  behavioural process whereby a response becomes more frequent or more predictable in a given environment as a result of reinforcement.' Essentially, Pavlov was looking at learning behaviours, not instinctive behaviours like Konrad Lorenz and Tinbergen. There are two different forms of conditioning - classical conditioning and operant conditioning. Pav lov's dogs follow the classical conditioning model, whereas Burrhus Skinner's rats follow the operant conditioning model. This is next week's topic. Your task this week is to investigate Pavlov's dogs.  To do this, please answer the following questions in the comments section. What is classical conditioning? What was Pavlov's study (his method)? ...

Nikolaas (Niko) Tinbergen was a Dutch biologist and ornithologist who shared a Nobel Prize with Konrad Lorenz and Karl von Frisch in 1973. He is also thought of as one of the founders of modern ethology.  The majority of Tinbergen's work focused on supernormal stimuli - an exaggerated version of a stimulus that a response is already known for. His two studies focused on eggs and stickleback fish. One of his first studies was also conducted on greylag geese. He found that mother geese would automatically scoop and roll back any egg that fell out of a nest less than 1m away. This retrieving movement with their neck would continue even if the egg was removed midway through the process. A movement like this that continues even without the original stimulus is called a fixed action pattern. However, as you can see in the below video - you can see that mother geese will gather anything that could be an egg! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PcteKRA3zs Your task is to look...