ethology
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AI overview
Ethology is the scientific study of how animals behave in their natural environments, examining everything from the waggle dance that honeybees use to communicate food locations to the elaborate courtship displays of grebes and the fighting behaviors of impalas. It matters because understanding animal behavior helps us learn how different species interact with each other and their surroundings, revealing the remarkable complexity of the natural world.
AI-generated from the Wikipedia summary — may contain errors.
Article
10 sectionsContents
- Etymology
- History
- The beginnings of ethology
- Growth of the field
- Social ethology
- Tinbergen's four questions for ethologists
- See also
- References
- Further reading
- External links
thumb|Honey bee|Honeybee workers perform the [[waggle dance to indicate the range and direction of food.]] thumb|Great crested grebes perform a complex synchronised [[courtship display.]] thumb|Male impalas fighting during the rut
Ethology is a branch of zoology that studies the behaviour of non-human animals. It has its scientific roots in the work of Charles Darwin and of American and German ornithologists of the late 19th and early 20th century, including Charles O. Whitman, Oskar Heinroth, and Wallace Craig. The modern discipline of ethology is generally considered to have begun during the 1930s with the work of the Dutch biologist Nikolaas Tinbergen and the Austrian biologists Konrad Lorenz and Karl von Frisch, the three winners of the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Ethology combines laboratory and field science, with a strong relation to neuroanatomy, ecology, and evolutionary biology.