Exploring Animal Behavior: Ultimate and Proximate Causes

1. Behavior Ethology: Study of behavior

2. Outline • Behavior is what an animal does and how it does it • Behaviors have both ultimate and proximate causes • Certain stimuli trigger innate behaviors called fixed action patterns • Learning is experience based modification of behavior • Rhythmic behaviors sync. Activities with temporal changes in the environment • Environmental cues guide movement • Sociobiology places social behavior in an evolutionary context • Competitive social behaviors often represent contests for resources • Mating behavior relates directly to an animals fitness • Communication • Inclusive fitness can account for most altruistic behavior

3. Babies make noise when no one is around • Trying to fit their vocalizations to internal templates? • Eventually turn into complex sounds • Communication is the result of genetic cues modified during development by environmental factors • Bird song works like this too

4. Bird songs vs. calls • Long vs. Short, arbitrary distinction • Crows have more than 20 different calls • Ludwig van Beethoven, for example, included imitations of the Nightingale, Quail and Cuckoo in his Symphony No. 6 (the Pastoral). • Pink Floyd's 1969 albums More and Ummagumma

5. Behavior what an animal does and how it does it • Study of animal behavior is as old as we are. • Need it to hunt • Cave art a study of behavior? • Domestication: control of behavior

6. Early 1900s – Ethology becomes formal discipline • Due to work of 3 ethologists • K. Lorenz studied waterfowl and other organisms • N. Tinbergen studied gulls and other organisms • K. Von Frisch studied communication in bees

7. Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution • Natural selection is going on so animals have to maximize their fitness • Recall fitness doesn’t exactly mean the strongest • How we feed • What mate we choose

8. Genetic component of behavior • If genes weren’t involved behavior wouldn’t be subject to natural selection and wouldn’t change over time • Genes set up the neural network that lets us learn. • Behavioral ecology: animals increase fitness by optimal behavior • Best explanation for the data

9. Studying genetic components of behavior • Can study twins: If Jacob is smart is Mack also? • Can study adoptees. If your real parents were alcoholics but your adopted parents are teetotalers what will you be? • Some example studies • Novelty seeking personality, ear wiggling, perfect pitch • propensity for smoking,Alcoholism, homosexuality • http://www.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/Human_Genome/elsi/behavior.shtml#3 Not really twins, but hey.

10. Lovebirds show innate behavior modified by experience

11. Behaviors have both ultimate and proximate causes • Ultimate cause: Why did this happen? • Ultimate causation - historical explanations • Explains why a behavior evolved • Study by measuring influence on survival or reproduction

12. Proximate cause: How did this happen? • Proximate causation - immediate causes • Explains how behavior works - what stimulates behavior to occur • Study by measuring or describing the stimuli that elicit behavior • Internal - physiological events (hormones, nervous system) • External - environmental stimuli

13. Example - bird migration • Proximate causes • External stimuli- changes in daylength • Internal stimuli - hormone levels • Ultimate causes - birds that migrate have a selective advantage over birds that don't/didn't, selected for over time, could be due to long term climate changes, glaciation, disease, taking advantage of food sources, etc.

14. Components of Behavior • 2 Components • Nature/innate: instinct and genes determine behavior • Nurture/learned: experience and learning influence behavior • Two extremes are not mutually exclusive, but work together to influence behavior

15. Examples of innate behavior • egg ejection by cuckoos (brood parasites) • freezing behavior of nestling birds when exposed to silhouettes (raptors versus waterfowl)

16. Components of Innate Behavior • Components of Innate Behavior • FAP - fixed action pattern, all or none response • Once started most animals will finish activity even if new stimuli show the activity to be inappropriate • Sign stimulus - causes release of FAP • Usually obvious aspect of morphology

17. Sticklebacks attack red

18. We’re sensitive to some stimuli more so than others • Frog’s are sensitive to movement of prey • Will starve if surrounded by dead/unmoving flies • Supernormal stimulus: artificial stimuli that elicit a stronger response • Oystercatchers will rather incubate a giant model of an egg instead of the real thing

19. Learned behavior • Learning: modification of behavior in response to specific experiences

20. Learning vs. Maturation • Doing something faster doesn’t mean you’ve learned • Experiment: they kept baby birds from flapping their wings until they should be old enough to fly and they flew normally and immeadiately.

21. Learning: Habituation • Loss of responsiveness to unimportant stimuli or stimuli that don’t provide appropriate feedback. • Banner blindness in web design

22. Lorenz’s study Chuck Jones study Salmon spawn back to stream of their birth from ocean; Olfactory imprinting Critical period: happens to young and adults Imprinting

23. Conservation issues • minimize/eliminate human presence while raising California Condors

24. Classical conditioning • Associative learning: one stimulus goes with another, the roar goes with the lion • Pavlov married the concepts of feeding and the sound of a bell in his dog’s mind • Alpert Watson conditioned an 11 month old orphan named Alpert to fear rats • California Sea Slug  has 20,000 neurons but can be habituated, and sensitized • Method’s useful for dealing with phobias

25. Learned helplessness • Results from inescapable punishment • continued failure may inhibit somebody from experiencing agency • They tie a dog down and associate a shock with a sound. • Then in another situation when the dog can escape, they make the sound and it doesn’t try to move. • The dog had previously "learned" that nothing it did mattered.

26. Learned helplessness • people doing mental tasks in the presence of noise. • Given a switch that would turn off the noise, performance improved, even though subject rarely bothered to turn off the noise. • being aware of the ability to have control was enough to substantially counteract its distracting effect.

27. Evidence of optimism? • Not all of the dogs became helpless. • About 1/3 of the 150 dogs tried to find ways out of unpleasant experiences even if they previously had no control. I’m an optimistic Steeler Fan

28. Operant conditioning • Trial and error learning • B.F. Skinner’s Skinner Box: rat in box with lever. Push the lever & food comes out. It learns to push the lever. • Acetycholine is released through cerebral cortex as we try things • In nature: good / bad tastes • Remember genes tell us what will taste good and bad, we learn from there

29. Observational Learning • “watch me…” • Bandura’s Bobo doll experiment: kids who watched adults beat up doll also beat up doll. • Kid watched Beavis start a fire • Started fire • Cartoon makers are now careful to not create copyable behavior.

30. Play • Activity with no goal, but is similar to goal-directed behavior. • Risky behavior • “practice” hypothesis play = learning • But do they really get better? • “exercise” hypothesis • Fat babies aren’t going to bring home the bacon

31. Insight Learning • Getting it right the first time with no prior experience • Corvidae: Crows, ravens,

32. Animal Cognition • Cognition: Ability to be aware and make judgments about your environment. • Are nonhuman animals cognitive? • Conscious? • Do they feel pain? • Anger? Fear? Sadness? Joy? • Are they humiliated when we dress them up? • Are animals just computer programs? • They can’t think to the ability we can • Is this a question of degrees? • Flip the coin: If animals don’t have meaningful emotion and its all hardwired, are humans the same?

33. Cognitive ethology • In Donald Griffins Question of Animal Awareness, he argued that animals have conscious minds like those of humans. • Jane Goodall (distantly related to Mr. Chessman) studied chimps, saw them fake injuries to get attention. • Lying = thinking about reality and other’s perceptions of it

34. Jay Gould of Harvard reported bee’s forming mental maps of foraging areas • Most people who spend time with animals feel that they can think. • Implications about how you view mankind’s position in the world.

35. Rhythms • Why do you sleep when you do? How does your body know to wake up? • External or internal cues? • Can you tell yourself to wake up in 4 hours and do so? • In controlled environments: all light, all dark, or twilight Humans have an internal clock of around 25 hours • What about long term things? If you kept animals in controlled environments for years would they mate at the same time as animals in the wild?

36. Sleep • No doc. Cases of human’s dying directly from lack of sleep. • Maybe from sleep deprived caused accidents • Studies of people awake for 10 days shows temporary decreases in cog. functions, but nothing long term • Microsleep • Can lead to our inability to metabolize glucose  cause of diabetes • Rats kept alive for 28 days die. Bags under eyes: Inheritable Etiologies: bone structure, pigments, eye ailments, nutrition, pregnancy, dehydration, circulation

37. Fatal Familial Insomnia • 28 families have it • Late onset Autosomal dominant: 50/50 chance of inheritance • Mutates a protein into a prion • Causes plaques on thalmus; sleep responsible region • Progression over 2 years: increasing insomnia, odd phobias, panic attacks, hallucinations, panic, agitation and sweating, dementia, total insomnia and sudden death after becoming mute.

38. Movement from external cues • Kinesis: change in activity rate in response to stim. • “Cold” blooded animals • Taxis: automatic movement towards or away from stim. • Trout orient so they face upstream • Geotaxis: King crab larvae orient down toward the earth

39. Migration • How do gold plovers go 13,000 km from arctic to S. America? • How do birds find Hawaii every year? • Pilot from landmark to landmark • Orient yourself on a straight line for the trip. • Navigation  complex mental mapping • Animals navigate like sailor from sun and stars

40. Indigo Bunting orients on North Star  • Can they sense the magnetic field? • Magnetite a magnetic mineral is found in heads of some birds, abdomens of some bees • Nothing’s been firmly established