Exercises

1. Check up your comprehension:

1. The birth rate in bats, badgers and stoats was extremely high.

2. Some animals can delay reproduction.

3. The inquiry took place in a lab of London Zoo.

4. Dr. Desmond Morris is a versatile person.

5. Behaviour students also use corpse in their investigations.

6. Behaviour students regard animals as people.

7. It is apparent that patterns of animal behaviour have echoes in our lives.

8. Jan Van Hoof was Desmond Morris's teacher.

9. Hoof's method of behaviour investigation was really unusual.

10. Hoof's object of research was animal physiology.

11. Mrs. Liozos is Hoof's colleague interested in play behaviour.

12. Ethologist and psychologist are the same specialities.

2. Ask one another questions about the text, try to give detailed answers.

3. Render the content of the article in 20-25 sentences.

Unit 5

Ethology

Word Study

1. Learn the meaning of the words:

trial	испытание	waggle	вилять
to inherit	наследовать	approach	подход
to trace back	прослеживать	vigor	бодрость
pattern	образец	gesture	жест
male	самец	spider	паук
female	самка	orb	шар
to revolve	вращаться	forage	корм
maze	лабиринт	to tend	иметь тенденцию
hive	улей	to tease apart	подробно изучать
innate	врождённый	adjust	поправлять

2. Practice the following for pronunciation:

ethology	phylogenetic method
ontogenetic	directly
psychology	modality

3. Translate the word combinations into Russian:

genetically-programmed behaviours	to tend to be trained
comparative approach	to put smb. through trials
to acquire behaviour patterns	to revolve around the problems
to hold to the view	internal biological clock
ontogenetic development	frantic dancing

Text a Ethology

Ethology is the zoological study of animal behaviour. Ethologists have a special interest in genetically programmed behaviours known as instincts. The predictable behavioural programs are inherited by animals through their parents and portions of the programs are open to natural se­lection and modification. Thus, these behaviours are phylogenetic adaptations that have an evo­lutionary history. This often leads to a comparative approach and has led researchers to search for the biological basis of human behaviour by comparing our activities to those of our close relative (other primates; especially chimps).

There are two schools of thought as to how animals acquire their behaviour patterns. Some hold to the view that animals, including humans, learn all their behaviour during the course of onto­genetic development. Ducks, for example, learn how to quack like a duck and don't honk like a goose because they hear their parents while within the egg. Experiments have since shown that these behaviours are built-in and not learned.

Very complex behaviour patterns can be passed on through the genes. A spider's orb web, for example, is built perfectly the first time a spider attempts construction, despite the fact that they may have no prior experience with webs. Female spiders construct egg sacs in the fall, and then die. The spiderlings emerge in the spring, and never had experience with an orb web be­fore building their own.

Ethology differs from the study of Animal Behaviour, in that animals' behaviourists generally are interested in learned behaviours while ethologists concentrate on innate behaviours. Also, animals' behaviourists tend to be trained in psychology, while ethologists are zoologists. Animal behav­iourists tend to work with "bright" animals, such as rats; putting them through trials with mazes and Skinner boxes. While the study of learned behaviour is both important and immediately ap­plicable to human psychology, these behaviours cannot have an evolutionary basis (other than the neural capacity to learn).

Konrad Lorenz, along with Karl von Frisch and Nikolaas Tinbergen are generally recognized as the "fathers of ethology". But the origins of ethology can be traced back to Charles Darwin and his work on the expressive movements of man and animals. Dar­win was the first to use a comparative phylogenetic method in the study of behaviour.

No discussion of ethology would be complete without mentioning Irenius Eibl-Eibesfeldt, who was the first to successfully apply ethological methods to the study of human behaviour. He carefully recorded the activities of humans using a side-viewing camera so the subjects didn't know they were being observed. By comparing gestures and body language across cultures, he identified numerous innate behaviour patterns in humans.

Much of the work in ethology revolves around problems in animal communication. In fact, this is the work for which von Frisch is best known. He teased apart the "dance language" of bees. Worker bees dance to communicate the distance, direction, and quality of a feeding place they have found while foraging around the hive. The dance is performed on the vertical comb of the hive. If the feeding place is directly toward the sun, the bees dance up. If the feeding place is directly away from the sun, they will dance down. Angles to the sun are also communicated. As the sun moves across the sky, the bees adjust their dance so that the direction is always up-to-date. If, for example, a bee finds food at sunrise and indicates that it is located directly to­ward the sun, by the time the sun sets, the bee will be dancing down. Thus, bees have an inter­nal biological clock that tells them where the sun should be in the sky without them having to go out and check.

Distance to the feeding place is communicated by the number of waggles at the center part of the dance. More waggles indicate greater distance. Sites with lots of high quality food are communicated by the vigor of the dance (very good sites produce frantic dancing). In addition, other workers paying attention to the dancer touch their sister and can determine what type of flower she visited by the pollen stuck on her hairs. A second dance, a round dance, is used when the food source is very close to the hive.

The type of communication an animal uses can be described by the sensory modality used to receive the signal.