11-13-06, Behavior

Today we will talk about one of the more interesting ideas of all that we do and that subject is “what is behavior?”. Let's talk about what behavior is. First of all, behavior is an extension of the way in which we sense the world. We talked about sensory perception before. We will not spend a long time dealing with the anatomical or necessarily the physiological means by which we obtain stimuli and we know these by the times that we were very little (eyes, nose, taste, touch), we know our five senses, and sometimes animals have more than five senses, they have extra senses that we do not time, and sometimes this isn't the case.

It is doubtful that all vertebrate animals have great hearing. We can't say that all animals can smell everything. Humans can smell 1 in 500 parts per million whereas bloodhounds can detect 1 in millions parts per million. Some dogs or maybe you did not know this, but some dogs are capable of the tell-tale vibrations given off before earthquakes, there are some breeds of dogs that can be aggravated by this.

Before a big rain storm, hours before it hits, the cows will come together with their heads pointed in the same direction. The tell-tale is the other end of the cow. The other end of the cow, and invariably they will align themselves so that they have their rear end facing the brunt of the storm. There are many different ways that we perceive those action through the stimuli that we get. But does that not really describe behavior?

What is your concept of behavior? The process of how one acts, okay, how does that go with another idea? How one acts, the manner in which you process the responses, and if I tell you all, that I will take this big Campbell Biology's book, 7^th edition and pick it up, and slam it as hard as one can against the desk, how many of you will jump? All of you? Well, some of you at least.

Our behavior says that we have learned-responses. Some students did not jump. Persona is also behavior. When we talk about behavior, we are talking about the ssence of how humans respond to their environment. How does that correlate to how animals respond to their environment? Do we respond differently? One of the major differences between us and other animals is that we learn. How many responses do we get when we are born? What are our instinctive responses? Differentiate between instinctive behaviors and reflex arcs.

Reflex arcs are not instinctive behaviors. Breast feeding and the ability to nurse has to be an instinctive ability. Some children are born without that instinct and it is extremely difficult to get them to survive. You have to teach them to have something that would have otherwise been engrained.

The other instinct that human beings are born with is that instinctive fear of falling. You hold them up and move downward then they will throw their arms and legs out and try to support themselves and they can't do that so don't drop them.

Animals have a wide array of instinctive behaviors. We take advantage of that and call it animal training. How many of you have been to Sea World? Not the zoo, no. How many of you have seen a killer whale in the wild?

You have to reinforce the behaviors that are instinctive to them. We have a really bad habit, as biologists, as personifying animal behaviors. We will see lions doing something, “The lion is now stalking because he is moring, so he has to eat,” that's not true, they're doing that as a result of an instinctive behavior, there is very little reasoning going on in the rest of the animal kingdom.

Read up on behavior training especially in Sea World and so on. Let's take today and run through behavior. We will go outside tomorrow.

The study of animal behavior is called ethology. Tomorrow, when we go out and you observe animals in their natural environment, you will do ethograms, which are snapshots (verbal, photographic, however), but they are snapshots of where animals are and what they are doing at any point in time.

Windex is the big suckerfish. If you spend all day and look at the aquarium and you study Coach (the other fish) you will see that they really don't do anything. At one point the other week, coach reacted when some new fish were added into that environment, and we could have described every 5 minutes where he was and so on. Identify where the animal is and what it is doing.

Ethology is animal behavior. Upfront, you have to know that if there is a question on the AP exam, you might want to know that ethology is not recognized as a true science. Much of what we know about behavior know that it is extremely nebulous.

There are three guys that we credit enormous gains to with respect to our understanding of behavior, especially Konrad Lorenz. Lorenz and Timbergen and Frisch which are all three German scientists, and so on. These three guys, what they did with their work with animals, they said that there are two kinds of behaviors: innate behaviors (behaviors they were born with) (programmed by genes), and learned behaviors (those behaviors that are learned) (programmed by the environment or by the situation in which the organism is in).

Let's start with innate behaviors and the four types of innate behaviors. Innate behaviors are those behaviors that are similar regardless of the situation, they are standard across the species, and they are relatively unchanged according to the reception of stimuli.

The first type of innate behavior is kinesis. A kinesis is the change of the speed of a random movement in response to an external stimulus. There are positive kinesis and there are negative kinesis. Each one of those are called a taxes (plurally, taxis). A taxes will have movement towards or away. There is a difference between kinesis and a taxes.

The third kind is a reflex. The first is kinesis. The second is taxes. The third is reflex. Reflex is an automatic movement of a body part in response to the stimulus.

Alright, the next type is called a FAP (fixed action pattern)—most complicated of the innate behavior. They are stereotyped and often complex series of movements in response to specific stimuli. Refer to them as FAPs (fixed action patterns). Truthfully, what we are talking about here is an instinct, and FAPs are programmed responses to a specific stimulus. There are some parameters to give in just a few moments. They are the things that are enivatebly going to occur. You get these through the genes and they are consistent throughout the species.

There are two parts to an FAP—the sign stimulus and that's what causes the behavior. The second part is the response itself, the FAP, the sign stimulus is sometimes called the releasive. Know what a peacock looks like. What does a peacock and a peahen look like in comparison? The males are colorful and there are many greens, blues, and those pretty little `eyes' and whatnot. Why do they have that? All of it is to attract a peahen (female peacock). Little did you know, the eyes cause a hormone to be released in the peahen that causes her to be receptive to fertilization, and if she does not see those, the eggs are not released and therefore there is no reproduction. The releaser is the big giant eye there.

The turkeys spread their fans in the same way. All of those are sign stimuli. These are FAPs. What else? What else is a FAP? We are looking to identify FAPs tomorrow. The fact that male cardinals are red is not a FAP. In the cardinal population, it is less important when men are lost rather than female—it's true. The loss of one male cardinal does not reduce the overall breeding ability of an entire population. The loss of one female removes that many possible cardinals from the next generation.

The releasors are the songs. The females go nuts over the singers of the cardinal world. The songs of the cardinals, which they sing every spring, you can hear them early in their morning, is the beginning of their mating ritual. Why not now? The releaser could possibly the color of the leafs, or maybe the wavelength of the sunlight, etc, they are all possible releasors, we call these Circadian rhythms.

Circadian rhythms are those daily FAPs that run or that initiate behaviors among the organisms classified under the animal kingdom—whether it is daylight, dark, the cycles of the moon, the cycles of weather, the cycles of the sun, the angle of sunlight. The second type of rhythms that are FAPs are circanle rhythms such as migration patterns, nesting patterns, those types of things. Animals that have a single breeding season as opposed to mating all year long. That mating season, whatever the releaser is, is a circanular event (not circadian).

Know the word “gestation period”, fawn, etc. Other types of animals, such as goats, we are in a big goat raising area, they are not circanle, they mate and breed all year long, so they have to keep the billies separate and so on because you do not want kid goats to be dropped out in the middle of a snow-storm. When sheep and cattle ranchers moved up north, they had huge wars, the sheep and cattle wars were intense, they were killing each other and hiring assassins and so on. Sheep are not circanle and breed all year long. They did not understand this. The sheeps would drop their lambs during midwinter and that's not the right time to have a baby in Montana because they freeze. The wars were unnecessary.

The second type of behavior, the one that we like the most, is learned behavior. (That's not true—I like innate behavior because of genetic engineering possibilities, says Bryan). The first of those is called imprinting. Imprinting was first put forth by Konrad Lorenz. He worked with geese, believe it or not. He found out that when a baby goose is born, that that baby goose imprints, as its mother, as the first thing that it sees, and if you take an egg about to hatch, and you take it away from mama guss and you show it some other object (dog, human) then that gussling imprints on that organism as its mother. Remember the story of the ugly duckling. Lorenz used the story of “the ugly duckling”. No, he didn't write it.

It is highly possible to create the situation of a `family' with very young dogs. You remove the pup from the family and you bring them into the family then you imprint them into the family and they really believe that they are part of the human family. Seriously. It's an enormous psychological problem.

The second of the learned behaviors is associative learning. Associative learning is the ability of an animal to associate one stimulus with that of another stimulus. Ragsdale is a hunter. He moved into Texas in the 1980s. He is 5^th generation New Mexicans. You know, hunting is probably a good way to bond with other guys because you just sit there for hours. Deer do not tend to associate food with shooting. They do not seem to get it. So that's not associative learning. Shoot a deer and then let it sit there. Within fifteen minutes, the deer come back to the feeder even with the dead deer still there.

When the feeder goes off, the deer comes back, this is classical conditioning. We are taking advantage of the fact that white tale deer do not have associative learning patterns and that they are easily classically conditioned. That's when an organism reinforces a response from a stimulus. The most classical is Pavlov and his dogs.