An Introduction to Animal Behaviour 6th Edition

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An Introduction To Animal Behaviour 6Th Edition

By Aubrey Manning and Marian Stamp Dawkins

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 color, An Introduction to Animal Behaviour 6th Edition PDF provides a beautifully written introduction to the fundamentals of animal behavior. Tinbergenโ€™s four questions of causation, evolution, development and function form the fundamental framework of the text, illustrated with fascinating examples of complex behavioral mechanisms. The authors provide accounts of all levels of behavior from the nerve cell to that of the population. The strengths of An Introduction to Animal Behavior as a textbook include its clear explanations and concise, readable text and the enthusiasm of the authors for their subject.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction

  • Questions about animal behaviour
  • The escaping cockroach
  • The courtship of the sage grouse
  • Units of the nervous system
  • Reflexes and more complex behaviour
  • Diversity and unity in the study of behaviour
  • Summary

2. The development of behaviour

  • Young animals grow up
  • Instinct and learning in their biological setting
  • The characteristics of instinct and learning
  • Genetics and behaviour
  • Development and changes to the nervous system
  • Hormones and early development
  • Early experience and the diversity of parental behaviour
  • Play
  • Imprinting
  • Bird song development
  • Conclusions
  • Summary

3. Stimuli and communication

  • What stimuli are and how they act
  • Diverse sensory capacities
  • The problem of pattern recognition
  • Sign stimuli (key features)
  • โ€˜Supernormalโ€™ stimuli
  • Neuroethological basis of sign stimuli
  • Other solutions for pattern recognition: generalize
  • Communication
  • What is communication?
  • Animal signals as effective stimuli
  • Honesty and deception in animal signalling
  • The honeybee dance
  • The calls of vervet monkeys
  • Summary

4. Decision-making and motivation

  • Decision-making on different time scales
  • Decision-making and โ€˜motivationโ€™
  • Measuring motivation
  • Is motivation specific or general?
  • Goals as decision points
  • Homeostasis and negative feedback
  • Competition between motivations
  • Inhibition/disinhibition
  • Decision-making with incomplete information
  • Conflict and โ€˜abnormalโ€™ behaviour
  • The physiology of decision-making
  • Hormones and sequences of behaviour
  • Conflict and physiological stress
  • Decision-making, motivation and animal welfare
  • Conclusions
  • Summary

5. Learning and memory

  • Learning as part of adaptation
  • Sensitization and habituation
  • Associative learning
  • Specialized types of learning ability
  • What do animals actually learn?
  • Are there higher forms of learning in animals?
  • The comparative study of learning
  • Social learning and culture
  • The nature of animal minds
  • The nature of memory
  • Summary

6. Evolution

  • The adaptiveness of behaviour
  • Genes and behavioural evolution
  • Kin selection and inclusive fitness
  • Evolutionarily stable strategies
  • Sex and sexual selection
  • Species isolation and species selection
  • Tinbergenโ€™s fourth question: the phylogeny of behaviour
  • Summary

7. Social organization

  • The individual in the crowd
  • Advantages of grouping
  • Diverse social groups
  • Eusociality: division into castes
  • Territory in the social organization of vertebrates
  • Mating systems and social organization
  • Dominance in social systems
  • Diverse mammalian social behaviour
  • Primate social organization
  • Summary

References
Figure credits
Index

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