Blog #4: Ethology
During the ethology, I not only learned about animal behavior–including humans–but I also learned about how certain individual or group behavior ultimately determines whether a population of species will survive and reproduce or not. To know all of this, I first had to learn the difference between individual and group behavior, which I did. Individual behavior refers to a concrete action made by an organism that benefits only them; they act for themselves. These are based on internal feelings, personality traits, instincts, etc. Group behavior consists in two or more individual organisms interacting to achieve particular goals or objectives. This type of behavior consists in collaboration and communication to reach a goal that not only benefits the individual, but the whole group. Knowing this, I was able to learn about the outcomes of group behaviors, and how it benefits a whole population: collaborating in a group, organisms are able to survive with the help of others, able to reproduce–since two individuals are needed for reproduction–, able to fight against other organisms, and more outcomes. Next, there are two videos that show examples of group behaviors in non-human organisms.
This video is an example of group behavior; we see a group of ants collaborating to take care of their queen ant and collaborating to fight off a tree scorpion. They are using cooperation and communication to perform this task. This is an innate behavior because since they are born they want to protect their mother; they feel tied to it. Yet, there is also learned behavior because not all ants know how to fight. The proximate cause for this behavior is to protect their mother and not die. Yet, the ultimate cause is to have the mother stay alive and reproduce much more ants–making the population larger than it is.
This video is also an example of group behavior, where the non-humans are monkeys and are collaborating to get food and eat–this is the proximate cause. The ultimate cause is that in order to be able to reproduce and grow as a population, monkeys need to be fed in order to survive. So these monkeys are eating and sharing the food in order to be able to maintain healthy and reproduce.
Even though we looked at more non-human behaviors during the unit, I was really able to figure out the "why's" of certain types of human behavior. For example, the affection between a mother and her baby child is a type of both innate and group behavior. This is group because there are two people or more involved and the behavior is shared between them; there is cooperation, communication, altruism, and other factors involved in this behavior. This is innate because naturally, a baby becomes attached to its mother during its first months of age, and the mother becomes naturally attached to her baby for the first hours of birth since she has carried this baby for nine months in her stomach; no one taught any of the two people to become affectionate towards one another.
In the image above, we can see a moment where two ants are collaborating by carrying food to their ant nest. Their goal is to eat, but they are collaborating by transitioning the food to a safe place to eat. Their proximate cause is to eat, but the ultimate cause is to keep the ant population surviving and healthy in order to reproduce and grow a larger population.
