Animal Behavior

Don’t write - just think about this… Why do all humans smile? How do sea turtles find their homes? Why do baby birds open their mouth wide? Why do dolphins play? Why do birds sing?

How? How does an animal do something? How do you behave?

Why? Why does this behavior occur? Why do you do that?

Behavior Performed in response to a stimulus Stimulus: any kind of signal that carries information and can be detected Response: a single specific reaction

Types of stimuli From your senses: sensory neurons Endocrine: response to hormones

Behavior Animals with little to no brain matter have very simple responses Taxis: an innate behavior Earthworm moves from light In response to light, temperature, chemicals etc…

Innate behavior Instinct or inborn behavior Appear fully functional the first time they are performed, even though they may have never encountered this Spider builds a web Human baby suckles Baby bird opens mouth wide for food

Learned behavior Acquired behaviors Can alter their behavior as a result of experience reward or punishment Toad sees something move it eats it Eats millipede (tastes bad) & learns to avoid it

4 types of learned behaviors Habituation Classical Conditioning Operant Conditioning Insight Learning

Habituation A process by which an animal decreases or stops its response to a repetitive stimulus No reward or harm Get used to it and then ignore it Birds near road

Classical Conditioning A mental connection between a stimulus and some kind of reward or punishment A dog has experience with toys, sees a ball, expects to play: reward A dog sees a newspaper will hide, thinks it might get hit

An example of Classical Conditioning… Ivan Pavlov Russian physiologist studying digestion Dogs salivate - innate behavior Pavlov rang a bell every time before he fed his dog Bell ( stimulus) Food (reward) Eventually he could simply ring a bell and the dog salivated

Operant conditioning Used for training animals Learns to behave in a certain way through repeated practice for a reward or to avoid punishment Trial and error

An example of Operant Conditioning… B.F. Skinner “Skinner box” Rat pressed a bar correct number of times received a treat Learned that the bar= a treat

Insight Reasoning Applies something already learned to a new situation Given a new math problem have to use the methods you already learned Hard for most animals to do this type of behavior

Imprinting Innate and learned behavior Serves to keep animals close to mom and close to food & home range Occurs in a specific time in young animals Afterward irreversible

Imprinting examples Birds learn to follow the first large moving object they see, but then they must remember which object that is Baby mammals recognize their mother through sight and smell Salmon use smell to imprint on which stream they hatched from so they can find it again