Animal Behavior

I. Definition of Animal Behavior: Any observable thing an animal does a. Covers broad range of activities from involuntary muscle movements to animal intelligence an social behavior b. Why? i. Exploit animals more efficiently 1. Want to domesticate animals 2. Use as food ii. Protect and conserve animals better iii. Academic reasons c. What kinds of questions? iv. Mechanistic: how? v. Evolutionary: Survival value 3. Proximate=near 4. Ultimate=last vi. Developmental: is behavior innate, genetic, environmental, cognitive? II. Techniques for Studying Animal Behavior d. Observation vii. Can see CORRELATIONS 2 events occur together in time (not necessarily simultaneously) viii. CAUSATION did one event happen because of other, different from correlation e. Experimentation ix. Can see causation f. Comparative Approach x. Use to answer questions about evolution III. Examples g. Observational Study: xi. Why do crab-eating macoques (Southeast Asian monkey) use special sleeping trees? Each troop had its own tree to sleep in but why? xii. Possible explanations: Food source, predator avoidance, advertisement, proclaim territory 5. Food source explanation no good! 6. Trees were dead and otherwise held no fruit 7. Monkeys traveled to trees with fruit but would return to the sleeping tree 8. Potential predators sometimes chose same trees as monkeys 9. After 9 months of observation, was no predation 10. Most troops chose tree opposite of another troops tree, they did not cross the river to forage in the other troop’s territory. If there wasn’t another troop’s tree opposite, the monkeys did go across the river. a. Supports advertisement/territorial behavior!