If you’re outside in the early morning and see a bird pulling a worm out of the ground, you are observing animal behavior. If your dog gets excited and wags its tail when you put on its leash, you’re seeing another example of animal behavior.

Animal behavior includes all of an animal’s responses to its environment.

Behavior has both inherited and learned components. A bird’s ability to make a nest is an inherited behavior. The same bird’s appearance at your garden feeder is a learned behavior.

Animal behavior is much less quantitative than the biology we’ve studied so far. We know that a bird building a nest is performing a behavior, but what biological mechanisms are involved?

Behavioral biologists often classify questions about a behavioral activity into two categories.

The proximate cause of a behavior involves factors that concern the mechanics of the behavior. For example: What triggers a response? What mechanisms underlie it?

The ultimate cause of a behavior involves factors that concern the significance of the behavior. For example: How did the behavior evolve? Why did the animal learn the behavior?

Animal behavior can be studied in the natural environment or in the laboratory.

The study of animal behavior in the wild is called ethology. You may have heard of ethologists such as Konrad Lorenz, who studied imprinting[?students will not know what "imprinting" is yet] in birds, and Niko Tinbergen, who studied display behavior in many animals.

The study of animal behavior in the laboratory is called behaviorism. Behaviorism is concerned with analyzing behavior in an experimental setting, rather than a natural environment. Behaviorism was made famous by the psychologist B. F. Skinner. Skinner invented the “Skinner box,” in which a rat learned to obtain food by pressing a lever.

In this activity, we’ll look at different types of behavior and their causes.

Next, we’ll consider how behaviors are learned.

We’ll move on to examine the genetic basis of behavior, and we’ll see how a complex series of actions can be traced back to information passed on in an animal’s DNA.

Finally we’ll look at the evolution of behavior, asking why some behaviors are inherited and some behaviors are learned.

Copyright 2006 The Regents of the University of California and Monterey Institute for Technology and Education