Types of Behavior

Animal Behaviors Fall into Several Categories

• Behavior is an animal’s most immediate way of dealing with its environment.

• Because the environment is complex and can change rapidly, most animals have many different kinds of behavior each suited to a particular situation.

Foraging Behavior

• Specialists feed primarily or exclusively on one kind of food.

• Generalists consume many different types of food.

• When one kind of food source is plentiful specialists forage more successfully. When no particular food source is more common generalists find more to eat.

Foraging Behavior

• Foraging involves a trade-off between a food’s energy content and availability.

• Animals tend to feed on prey that maximize their energy intake per unit of foraging time. This approach is called optimal foraging.

Animals Often Communicate in Complex Ways

• A signal can be a sound, posture, movement, color, scent, or a facial expression.

• These signals are sent and received through all of the senses familiar to us.

• Animals use signals to influence the behavior of other animals.

A signal to ‘back off’.

Primate Communication

• Among animals, vocal communication is most developed in the primates.

• Many primates have a ‘vocabulary’ of sounds that allows individuals to communicate the identity of specific predators.

• Chimps and gorillas can learn to recognize and use a large number of symbols.

Kanzi of the Bonobos• In an outing in the Georgia

woods, Kanzi touched the symbols for "marshmallows" and "fire." "Given matches and marshmallows, Kanzi snapped twigs for a fire, lit them with the matches and toasted the marshmallows on a stick." (Anecdote told by Savage-Rumbaugh to Paul Raffaele, published in Smithsonian magazine, November 2006.)

Check this link out.

• Kanzi uses symbols to communicate.• http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/bonobos/kanzi.html

The written

symbols used by Kanzi.

Language in Humans

• In humans, language develops at a very early age. Infants begin to learn language by trial-and-error during the ‘babbling baby’ phase.

• Infants pick out the sounds used by the people around them and repeat only those sounds.

Choosing a Mate Involves the Interplay of Many Behvaiors

• When ready to mate animals produce signals to communicate with potential partners.

• In many animals, females seem to evaluate the male before she decides whether to mate. This behavior is called mate choice.

• Males often have extreme characteristics that they used in courtship displays.

Mate Choice

• Darwin recognized that the extreme traits could have evolved if they helped males attract or acquire mates.

• Sexual selection is an evolutionary mechanism in which traits that increase the ability of individuals to attract or acquire mates appear with increased frequency.