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Animal Behaviour

History of Ethology

DR. KALEEM AHMED (M.PHIL, PHD)

Assistant Professor
Department of Wildlife Sciences
Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh
Mobile + 91 94191 72499, 7078246164
Webpage: https://www.amu.ac.in/dshowfacultydata.jsp?did=42&eid=10077040
History of Ethology
• Ethology is the science that study animal
behaviour, usually with a focus on behaviour
under natural conditions

• The term ethology derives from the Greek


language ethos meaning "character" and logia
meaning "the study of
History of Ethology
• The overall study of the behaviour of animals
in their natural environment has a long
history.

• An enormous amount of descriptive material,


as well as some experimental material, was
done in 18th- and 19th-century by natural
scientists—
History of Ethology
• Piere Gassendi (1592 -1655) in his Syntagma
philosophicum he undertook a comparative
study of animal and human cognitive abilities

• Discover they were logically similar

• Both human and animal souls operated on


sensory images to yield reasoned action
History of Ethology
• René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur (1683 –
1757) was a French scientist who contributed
to many different fields, especially the study
of insects

• Charles-Georges Le Roy (1723 – 1789) was a


French man one of the first books on animal
behaviour
History of Ethology
• Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707
– 1788) was a French naturalist,
mathematician, cosmologist, and encyclopedic
author.

• His works influenced the next two generations


of naturalists
History of Ethology
• The term was first popularized by William Morton
Wheeler an American myrmecologist (the study
of ants)

• 1902 became the leading authority on the


behaviour of social insects achieving particular
renowned for his studies of social behaviour of
ants

• Instrumental in the development of ethology and


first popularized the term in 1902
History of Ethology
• Ethology was directly influenced by the works of
Charles Darwin

• The great number of facts he collected about the


behaviour of animals in their natural environment
made it possible to distinguish the basic
categories of behaviour

• —namely, instinct, learning ability, and the


elementary ability to reason
History of Ethology
• Darwins Contribution in Growth of Ethology
• Charles Darwin (1809-1882) influenced the
development of ethology in three main ways:

• First and foremost his theory of natural selection


(forwarded in his book Origin of Species 1859)

• In this he set the stage for consideration of


animal behavior in evolutionary terms
History of Ethology
• Second Darwin views on instinct can be regarded as direct fore
runner of those of founders of classical ethology (i.e Lorenz and
Tinbergen)

• Third Darwin observation on behavior were important especially


those that stemmed from his belief in the evolutionary continuity of
human beings and other animals

• E..g: In his book The Descent of Man and Selection in relation to


sex (1871)

• Drawin wrote that senses and intuitions and various emotions such
as love, memory, attention, curiosity, reason etc of which human
being boasts may be found in develop or even sometimes a well
developed conditions in lower organism
History of Ethology
• The development of ethological beliefs was directly influenced by
the research studies of various scientists

• (Englishman D. Spaulding, the American C. O. Whitman, and the


German O. Heinroth)

• Who demonstrated experimentally that certain forms of behaviour


are of innate origin, are uniformly manifested

• and are specific to certain species

• Charles Otis Whitman (1842 - 1910) who coined the term instinct
History of Ethology
• Pierre Flourens (1794 – 1867) De l'Instinct et
de l'intelligence des animaux emphasized the
idea that animal behavior is determined both
by instinct and intelligence.

• Alfred Russel Walace (1823 - 1913) considered


that instinct were initially intelligent action,
which, through regular and automatic fixing
and become hereditary
History of Ethology
• Wallace Craig (1876–1954) was an American the ethologist and
animal psychologist.

• He provided a conceptual framework for the study of behaviour


organization and is regarded as one of the founders of ethology

• He studied behaviour of pigeons and doves

• Craig experimentally studied the behavioural expression of emotion

• the way innate and learned behavioural tendencies are integrated

• and how vocal as well as social behaviours are organized


History of Ethology
• Jaques Loeb (1859 - 1924), was a German-born American
physiologist and biologist

• Loeb developed a theory of animal behaviour based on the concept


of tropism, an involuntary forced movement

• He found that an animal's response is a direct and autonomic


function of a reaction to a stimulus

• In other words, behaviour is said to be forced by a stimulus, it does


not require any explanation in terms of an animal's consciousness

• Loeb's theory was very influential for the time of Biological sciences
History of Ethology
• H.S. Jennings (1868 – 1947), demonstrated by
his works that animals are capable of
performing orientation movements learned by
trial and error.
History of Ethology
• E.L. Thorndyke (1874 – 1949) was a pioneer not only in
behaviourism and in studying learning, but also in using animals in
psychology experiments

• Thorndike was able to create a theory of learning based on his


research with animals

• His doctoral dissertation, “Animal Intelligence: An Experimental


Study of the Associative Processes in Animals”, was the first in
psychology where the subjects were nonhumans

• He was interested in whether animals could learn tasks through


imitation or observation.
History of Ethology
• Oskar Heinroth (1871 - 1945) was a German biologist who
was one of the first to apply the methods of comparative
morphology to animal behaviour, and was thus one of the
founders of ethology

• His extensive studies of behaviour in the Anatidae (ducks


and geese) showed that instinctive behaviour patterns
correlated with taxonomic relationships determined on the
basis of morphological features

• He also rediscovered the phenomenon of imprinting,


reported in the 19th century by Douglas Spalding but not
followed up at the time
History of Ethology
• After the Second World War there were two broad
approaches to the study of animal behaviour in Europe and
America

• The European school was founded in the 1930's by the


Austrian Konrad Lorenz

• He collaborated with the Dutch zoologist Niko Tinbergen to


establish 'ethology' which he defined as the 'biological
study of behaviour‘

• .
History of Ethology
• Nikolaas "Niko" Tinbergen (15 April 1907 -1988) was a Dutch biologist and
ornithologist.

• In 1951, he published The Study of Instinct, an influential book on animal behaviour

• Tinbergen's book 'The Study of Instinct' remains the best introduction to the
ethological approach to the study of animal behaviour

•
• Konrad Lorenz (1903 – 1989) was an Austrian zoologist, ethologist, and
ornithologist.

• Konrad Lorenz is considered to be one of the principal founders of ethology, a branch


of science that attempts to gain a deeper insight of behavioural patterns in animals.

• Tinbergen and Lorenz helped maked the study of animal behavior a part of modern
biology
History of Ethology
• No scientific journals were devoted to
behavioral research until 1930

• They and their colleagues investigated both


proximate and ultimate questions about the
behavior of gulls, jackdaws, butterflies, snow
bunting, greylag geese, moth cater pillar, and
many other animals in their natural
environment.

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