BIO3141: Animal Ecology and

Behaviour

Dr Venuste Nsengimana, Senior Lecturer

Content
Unit 1: Introduction to Ecology and Biosphere
Unit 2: Behavioural Ecology
Unit 3: Population Ecology
Unit 4: Community Ecology
Unit 5: Ecosystem Dynamics
Unit 6: Conservation Biology
Unit 7: Biodiversity Conservation in Rwanda
Unit 2: Behavioral Ecology
Dr Venuste Nsengimana, Senior Lecturer
Introduction
• Behavioral ecology extends the observation of animal behavior
by studying how such behavior is controlled and how it
develops, evolves and contributes to survival and reproductive
success
• A behavioral ecologist might ask similarities or
differences in courtship ( in time, dating ..) displays may
be related to genetic similarities or differences among
species and how learning contributes to the reproductive
success of species.
• The term behavior is defined as the way in which somebody
behaves.
• In psychology, it is defined as a response or the way in
which a person, organism, or group responds to a
specific set of conditions.
• The scientific study of how animals behave particularly in their
natural environment is called Ethology.
A. ELEMENTS OF ANIMAL BEHAVIOR
1. Stimuli and responses
• Ecologists define behavior as the way an organism reacts to changes
in its internal conditions or external environment.
• A behavior can be simple, such as turning your head in the direction
of noise, or complex such as washing food.
• Usually, behaviors are performed when an animal reacts to a
stimulus, which is any kind of signal that carries information
and can be detected.
Examples of stimulus
• Internal stimulus: If you are hungry, your body is providing you
with an internal stimulus that might prompt you to eat.
• External stimulus: The sound of your phone ringing is an external
stimulus that might result in your running to answer it.
• A single, specific reaction to a stimulus such as waking up
when you hear an alarm is called response
• A behavior may consist of more than one response. For example, a
tiger shark, might respond to the movements of potential prey by
swimming toward the stimulus, attacking the source of the movement
and swallowing the prey.
Types of stimuli
• Animals respond to many types of external stimuli such as light,
sound, odors, and heat. However, not every animal can detect all
these stimuli.
Humans perceive the world through many senses – including sight,
smell, touch, taste and hearing.
Other animals have different senses and may respond to stimuli
that the human is not equipped to sense such as high-pitched
sounds, magnetic fields…
• Stimulus may be also, the sight of food, the sound of a potential
predator, or the smell of a mate,
Response to a stimuli
• Because of the differences in animal’s sensory abilities,
responses can vary greatly
• Once an animal’s senses have detected an external stimulus,
that information is passed along nerve cells to the brain
• The brain and other parts of the nervous system process the
information and direct the body’s response.
• Animals with very simple nervous systems are capable of only
simple behaviors such as moving toward a stimulus or away
from it.
For example, an earthworm will move away from bright light.
• Animals with more complex nervous systems such as the frog
are better equipped to respond with more complicated and
precise behavior.
2. Behavior and Evolution
• Animal behavior is important to survival and reproduction as
any physical characteristics such as teeth or claws
• Many behavior are influenced by genes, and therefore, some
behavior can be inherited by an animal’s offspring
• Behaviors, like physical characteristics, may evolve under the
influence of natural selection
• A behavior that is directed by genes may help an individual to
survive under and reproduce.
• Organisms with an adaptive behavior will survive and
reproduce better than organisms that lack the behavior
• After natural selection has operated for many generations,
most indivuduals in the population will exhibit the adaptive
behavior.
3. Innate behavior
• Ecologists may ask some questions such as why do newly hatched
birds beg for food within moments after hatching? How do spiders
know how to build their first web?
• These animals are exhibiting an innate behavior, also called an
instinct ( nature) or inborn behavior.
• Innate behaviors appear in fully functional form the first time they
are performed, even though the animal may have had no previous
experience with the stimuli to which it responds
• One of the simplest innate behaviors is the suckling of a newborn
mammal.
• Other innate behavior such as the weaving of spider web, building
of hanging nests by weaver birds can be quite complex
• All innate behaviors depend on internal mechanisms that develop
as a result of complex interactions between an animal’s genes
4. Learned behavior
• Animals often live in unpredictable environments, so their
behavior must be flexible enough to deal with uncertainty and
change
• Many animals can alter their behavior as a result of experience.
Such changes are called learning.
• Acquired behavior is another name for learning, because these
behaviors develop over time.
• Many animals can learn: Organisms with simple nervous
systems such as most invertebrates may learn only rarely
• Among few invertebrates and many chordates, learning is
common and occurs under a wide range of circumstances
• In animals that care for their young for example, the offspring
can learn behaviors from their parents or other caretakers.
• The four major types of learning are: habituation, classical
conditioning, operant conditioning and insight learning.
4. 1. Habituation
• it is a process by which an animal decreases or stops its
responses to a repetitive stimulus that neither rewards nor
harms the animal
Example of habituation
• Consider the common shorerag worm living in a sandy tube that
it leaves only to feed.
• If a shadow passes overhead, the worm will instantly retreat to
the safety of its burrow.
• Yet, if repeated shadows pass within a short time span, this
response quickly subsides (decrease).
• When the worm has learned that the shadow is neither food nor
threat, it will stop responding.
• At this point the worm has habituated to the stimulus, which in
this case is the shadow passage.
4.2. Classical conditioning
• When a dog sees its owner approaching with a leash ( lead or
chaine) it may wag its tail and bark, eager to go for a walk.
• The dog has learned to associate the sight or the leash with a walk.
• Any time an animal makes a mental connection between a
stimulus and some kind of reward or punishment, it has
learned by classical conditioning
• In the case of the dog and its owner, the stimulus is of the leash is
associated with a pleasant ( enjoyable) reward – a brisk walk.
• On the other hand, suppose that the dog tries to attack a skunk
which in turns sprays the dog with a substance that stings ( bites)
and smells awful (bad )
• In the future that dog is likely to avoid skunks, because it
associates the stimuli of the sight and scent of the skunk with the
punishment of its foul spray
4.3. Operant conditioning
• Conditioning is often used to train animals.
• Operant conditioning occurs when an animal learns to behave in a
certain way through repeated practice in order to receive a reward
or avoid punishment
• It is also called trial – and – error learning because it begins with a
random behavior that is rewarded in an event called a trial
• Most trials result in errors, but occasionally a trial will lead to a
reward or punishment
4.4. Insight learning
• Insight learning or reasoning occurs when an animal applies
something it has already learned to a new situation without a
period of trial and error.
• For example, if you are given a new math problem on an exam,
you may apply principles you have already learned in the class in
5. Instinct and learning combined
• Some young animals learn to recognize and follow the first
moving object that they see during a critical time early in their
lives called sensitive period.
• This process is called imprinting. It keeps young animals
close to their mother, who protects them and leads them to
food sources.
• Once imprinting has occurred, the behavior can not be
changed.
• Imprinting involves both innate and learned behavior.
• The young animals have an innate urge to follow the first
moving object they see, but they are not born knowing what
that object will look like.
• The young animal must learn from the experience what object
to follow. In fact, the object on which the young animal
Ducklings, as soon as they are born, Konrad
Lorenz being
get imprinted by the first moving object followed by
imprinted
they see- most commonly their mother. geese
• Imprinting can occur through scent ( aroma or odor) and sight. Newly
hatched salmon for example imprint on the odor of the stream in which they
hatch, young salmon then head out to sea.
• Years later, when they mature , the salmon remember the order of their
home stream and return there to spawn
• When there is a sequence of unlearned behavioral acts that is
essentially unchangeable, so that when it is initiated, is usually carried to
completion, we call it Fixed Action Patterns (FAP).
• A FAP is triggered by an external sensory stimulus known as a sign stimulus.
• A classic example of sign stimuli and FAPs in the male stickleback
fish, which attacks other males that invade its nesting territory.
• The stimuli is the red underside of the intruder ( invaders) . The stickleback
will not attack and intruding fish lacking a red belly but will readily
attack unrealistic models as long as some red is present.
• Consequently, the red color is a key component of the sign stimulus
releasing aggression in male sticklebacks.
• Fixed Action Patterns (FAP)

Egg Rolling and the Greylag

Goose
B. PATTERNS OF ANIMAL BEHAVIOR
1. Behavioral cycle
• The environment is full of natural cycles. Night follows day,
seasons change, the moon has phases, the tides rise and
fall
• Many animals respond to periodic changes in the environment
with daily or seasonal cycle of behavior
• For example, several species of reptiles and mammals are
active during warm seasons but enter into a sleeping
state, or dormancy during cold seasons.
• Dormancy allows an animal to survive periods when food and
other resources may not be available
• Another type of behavior that is influenced by changing
seasons is migration, the periodic movement from one
place to another and then back again.
2. Courtship
• In courtship, an individual sends out stimuli such as sounds, visual
displays or chemicals in order to attract a member of the opposite
sex
• For example:
Fireflies flash a distinct series of light signals to indicate their
readiness to mate.
The musical trill of a tree frog and sheep like bleat of a narrow
mouth toad are among the many distinctive breeding calls of
amphibians
• In some species, courtship involves an elaborate series of
behaviors called rituals.
• A ritual is a series of behaviors performed the same way
by all members of a population for the purpose of
communicating.
• Most rituals consist of specific signals and individual
3. Social behavior
• Whenever animals interact with members of their own
species, as in courtship, they are exhibiting social behavior
• Many animals go beyond courtship in their social behavior and
form societies
• An animal society is a group of related animals of the
same species that interact closely and often cooperate
with one another
• It takes the cooperative work of millions of termites for
example to build a single termite mound
• For some species, membership in a society offers great
survival advantages.
• Zebra and other grazers, for example, band together when
grazing. They are safer from predators when they are part of
the group rather than when they are alone.
• Animal societies also use strength in numbers to improve their
ability to hunt, to protect their territory, to guard their young and
to fight with rivals if necessary
• Often, members of a society are closely related to one another.
Related individuals share a large proportion of each other’s
genes.
• Therefore, helping a relative survive increases the chance that
the genes an individual shares with that relative will be passed
along to offspring
• Thus, social behavior that helps a relative survive and reproduce
improves an individual's evolutionary fitness.
• Primates form some of the most complex animal social groups
known.
• Macaque, baboon and other primate societies hunt together,
travel in search of new territory and interact with neighboring
4. Competition and Aggression
• Some animals have behaviors that help prevent others from
using limited resources.
• Often, such patterns involve a specific area or territory, that is
occupied and protected by an animal or group of animals.
• Territories contain resources such as food, water, nesting sites,
shelter, and potential mates, that are necessary for an animal’s
survival and reproduction.
• By claiming a territory, an animal keeps others at a distance.
• If a rival enters a territory, the owner of the territory may
attack the rival and drive it away.
• When two or more animals try to claim limited resources such
as territory or food, competition occurs.
• During competition, animals may also show aggression, a
threatening behavior that one animal uses to gain control over
another.
5. Communication
• Often when animal behavior involves more than one
individual, some form of communication – the passing of
information from one organism to another – is involved.
• Animals may use visual, sound, touch or chemical signals to
communicate with one another.
• The specific techniques that animals use depend on the types
of stimuli their sense can detect
5.1. Visual signals
• Animals with good eyesight often use visual signals involving
movement and color.
• Cuttlefish, for example, have large eyes that are as
sophisticated as those of vertebrates, allowing them to
undergo changes in the colors and patterns on its body in a
matter of seconds.
5.2. Sound signals
• Animals with strong vocal abilities such as crickets, toads and
birds, communicate with sound and Some animals that use sound
have evolved elaborate communication systems.
• Dolphins for example rely mainly on sound signals in the dark and
often murky ocean depths where vision is not very useful.
• Ecologists have discovered that bottlenose dolphins each have
their own unique signature whistle that is used for recognition.
• The dolphins' whistles function something like the signature on a
letter, letting others known who is sending the communication.
5.3. Language
• The most complicated form of communication is the language,
which is a system of communication that combines sounds,
symbols or gestures according to sets of rules about the word
order and meaning, such as grammar and syntax (sentence
structure, or words order…)
• Many animals like dolphins, elephants, and gorillas have fairly
complex ways of communicating.
• However, outside of the experiment, none of those animals have
been shown using language. Only humans are known to use
language.
5.4. Chemical signals
• Animals with well developed senses of smell such as insects,
fishes and many mammals may communicate with chemicals.
• For example, some animals release pheromones, chemical
messengers that affect the behavior of other individuals of the
same species, to mark a territory or to signal their readiness to
mate.
• Pheromone can also indicate a danger. For example, when a
catfish is injured alarm substance disperse in water, including a
flight response among other fish in the area
• These nearby fish become more vigilant and group together,
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