Behaviour

A male bowerbird spends weeks building a tunnel of twigs and decorating the ground in front of it with blue bottle tops, feathers and flowers, then rearranges them every morning. A gosling three hours out of the egg follows the first moving object it sees, for the rest of its childhood. A dog at an airport sits down beside one suitcase in a hall of two hundred. None of these animals is being charming, obedient or clever. Each is doing something that made its ancestors more likely to leave offspring behind.

This lesson treats behaviour as biology rather than personality. You will look at how animals advertise their quality to a mate and at the four mating strategies you are asked to know, at what parents gain and risk by caring for young, and at the five categories of behaviour on the specification: innate behaviour, imprinting, habituation, classic conditioning and operant conditioning. You will then see how trainers exploit conditioning to produce sniffer dogs and police horses, and how animals get messages to each other with sound, chemicals and visual displays. Along the way you will meet the two neighbouring topics this one leans on hardest, natural selection and adaptation, because almost every mark in a behaviour question is really a mark for one of them.