An Introduction to Animal Behaviour

by Aubrey Manning , Marian Stamp Dawkins

• ISBN13: 9780521165143
• ISBN10: 0521165148
• Edition: 6th
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2012-03-26
• Publisher: Ingram Pub Services

Summary

Wolves excitedly greet each other as members of the pack come together; a bumble bee uses its long tongue to reach the nectar at the base of a foxglove flower; a mongoose swiftly and deftly bites its prey to death; young cheetahs rest quietly together, very close to sleep. Now in full colour, this revised and updated edition of Manning and Dawkins' classic text provides a beautifully written introduction to the fundamentals of animal behaviour. Tinbergen's four questions of causation, evolution, development and function form the fundamental framework of the text, illustrated with fascinating examples of complex behavioural mechanisms. The authors provide accounts of all levels of behaviour from the nerve cell to that of the population. The strengths of An Introduction to Animal Behaviour as a textbook include its clear explanations and concise, readable text and the enthusiasm of the authors for their subject.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. ix
Introduction	p. 1
Questions about animal behaviour	p. 5
The escaping cockroach	p. 7
The courtship of the sage grouse	p. 11
Units of the nervous system	p. 16
Reflexes and more complex behaviour	p. 20
Diversity and unity in the study of behaviour	p. 30
Summary	p. 31
The development of behaviour	p. 33
Young animals grow up	p. 34
Instinct and learning in their biological setting	p. 40
The characteristics of instinct and learning	p. 45
Genetics and behaviour	p. 49
Development and changes to the nervous system	p. 57
Hormones and early development	p. 62
Early experience and the diversity of parental behaviour	p. 68
Play	p. 78
imprinting	p. 84
Bird song development	p. 94
Conclusions	p. 06
Summary	p. 106
Stimuli and communication	p. 109
What stimuli are and how they act	p. 111
Diverse sensory capacities	p. 114
The problem of pattern recognition	p. 126
Sign stimuli (key features)	p. 128
'Supernormal' stimuli	p. 130
Neuroethological basis of sign stimuli	p. 135
Other solutions for pattern recognition: generalized feature detection	p. 139
Communication	p. 144
What is communication?	p. 145
Animal signals as effective stimuli	p. 150
Honesty and deception in animal signalling	p. 159
The honeybee dance	p. 164
The calls of vervet monkeys	p. 173
Summary	p. 177
Decision-making and motivation	p. 179
Decision-making on different time scales	p. 182
Decision-making and 'motivation	p. '193
Measuring motivation	p. 193
Is motivation specific or general?	p. 199
Goals as decision points	p. 202
Homeostasis and negative feedback	p. 205
Competition between motivations	p. 209
InMbition/msinhibition	p. 211
Decision-making with incomplete information: the role of signals	p. 213
Conflict and'abnormal'behaviour	p. 217
The physiology of decision-making	p. 220
Hormones and sequences of behaviour	p. 227
Conflict and physiological stress	p. 232
Decision-making, motivation and animal welfare	p. 233
Conclusions	p. 236
Summary	p. 237
Learning and memory	p. 239
Learning as part of adaptation	p. 239
Sensitization and habituation	p. 242
Associative learning	p. 246
Specialized types of learning ability	p. 257
What do animals actually learn?	p. 262
Are there higher forms of learning in animals?	p. 264
The comparative study of learning	p. 268
Social learning and culture	p. 272
The nature of animal minds	p. 276
The nature of memory	p. 294
Summary	p. 298
Evolution	p. 301
The adaptiveness of behaviour	p. 302
Genes and behavioural evolution	p. 310
Kin selection and inclusive fitness	p. 316
Evolutionarily stable strategies	p. 328
Sex1 and sexual selection	p. 336
Species isolation and species selection	p. 345
Tinbergen's fourth question: the phylogeny of behaviour	p. 348
Summary	p. 353
Social organization	p. 355
The individual in the crowd	p. 355
Advantages of grouping	p. 358
Diverse social groups	p. 364
Eusociality: division into castes	p. 364
Territory in the social organization of vertebrates	p. 369
Mating systems and social organization	p. 373
Dominance in social systems	p. 378
Diverse mammalian social behaviour	p. 381
Primate social organization	p. 388
Summary	p. 403
References	p. 405
Figure credits	p. 435
Index	p. 442
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