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Behavioral ecology is a branch of ethology that studies the effects of evolutionary and environmental factors on animal behavior. It focuses on the four causes of behavior: function, causality, development, and evolutionary history. Behavioral ecologists examine how organisms adapt to survive and thrive in their ecosystem. The ultimate goal is to answer the “why” questions concerning animal behavior, including humans.
While ethology is a holistic, multidisciplinary study of animal behavior, behavioral ecology is a specific branch of ethology that aims to evaluate the effects of evolutionary and environmental factors on animal behavior. The field of behavioral ecology emerged when Nikolaas Tinbergen, a Dutch ethologist, outlined four main causes of behavior. These are function, causality, development and evolutionary history.
The four causes of behavior refer to almost every action an animal does. Assessing the impact of these four causes in specific situations is the main focus of behavioral ecology. The biology of organisms seeks to answer many questions about animals and what they do. Behavioral ecology addresses the “why?”
A study of function addresses what an animal gains by making a decision. Tinbergen extensively studied bird behavior. While he studied the function of their predatory behavior, he hoped to discover how the choice and location of prey items contributed to the survival of birds and their offspring. The function of a given behavior is generally related to the organism’s environment.
While studying causation, Tinbergen took a step back and asked what prompted birds to forage in a particular place in the first place. Just as human behavior is influenced by the awareness that there is food in the refrigerator, animal behavior is influenced by signals that signal the presence of various needs. For example, birds circling a certain area may indicate the presence of nearby prey. The circling gulls are the cause of another bird choosing to forage there for food.
Development refers to the roles of genetic predisposition and learning about behavior. Most birds are able to fly, so they have a genetic predisposition to find food from the sky. In many cases, they have also seen their parents hunting or foraging. They learned various methods of obtaining food from their parents. Their development has had a direct impact on many behaviors that keep them alive on a daily basis.
Behavioral ecologists don’t just focus on the specific organism they are studying. They also examine the creature’s evolutionary history, observing various adaptations and trends that appear in its phylogeny. Ecologists can examine how a population of birds entered an ecosystem, spread through it, and adapted to survive and thrive in it. The birds may have faced competition that forced them to adapt to a different food supply, or their beaks may have become longer to allow them to reach for a certain type of prey.
Behavioral ecology aims to answer the ‘why’ questions concerning animals, including humans. Industry pioneer, Niko Tinbergen, set the framework for answering this question, but there are still many unanswered questions. Animals, especially humans, can be very complex and understanding why they do what they do is often not an easy task. Perhaps one day, behavioral ecologists will have a universal understanding of animal behavior.
