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Ethology, the study of animal behaviour, has been a topic of interest since the 1930s.The pioneers of the field include Dutch biologist Nikolaas Tinbergen and Austrian biologists Karl von Frisch and Konrad Lorenz [13] [14] [15] (the three won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1973 for their discoveries concerning organization and elicitation of individual and social behaviour ...
The start of behaviour genetics as a well-identified field was marked by the publication in 1960 of the book Behavior Genetics by John L. Fuller and William Robert (Bob) Thompson. [1] [10] It is widely accepted now that many if not most behaviours in animals and humans are under significant genetic influence, although the extent of genetic ...
Behavioral epigenetics is the field of study examining the role of epigenetics in shaping animal and human behavior. [1] It seeks to explain how nurture shapes nature, [2] where nature refers to biological heredity [3] and nurture refers to virtually everything that occurs during the life-span (e.g., social-experience, diet and nutrition, and exposure to toxins). [4]
Behavioral ecology, also spelled behavioural ecology, is the study of the evolutionary basis for animal behavior due to ecological pressures. Behavioral ecology emerged from ethology after Niko Tinbergen outlined four questions to address when studying animal behaviors: What are the proximate causes, ontogeny, survival value, and phylogeny of a behavior?
W. D. Hamilton [13] was among the first to propose an explanation for natural selection of altruistic behaviors among related individuals. According to his model, natural selection will favor altruistic behavior towards kin when the benefit (as a contributing factor to reproductive fitness) towards the recipient (scaled based upon Wright's coefficient of genetic relatedness between donor and ...
For example, adaptive behavior is a mechanism of population stabilization. [23] In natural communities, organisms are able to interact with each other creating complex food webs and predator-prey dynamics. Adaptive behavior helps modulate the dynamics of feeding relationships by having a direct effect on their feeding traits and strategies. [23]
Phenotypic plasticity refers to some of the changes in an organism's behavior, morphology and physiology in response to a unique environment. [1] [2] Fundamental to the way in which organisms cope with environmental variation, phenotypic plasticity encompasses all types of environmentally induced changes (e.g. morphological, physiological, behavioural, phenological) that may or may not be ...
Foraging is searching for wild food resources. It affects an animal's fitness because it plays an important role in an animal's ability to survive and reproduce. [1] Foraging theory is a branch of behavioral ecology that studies the foraging behavior of animals in response to the environment where the animal lives.