Animal Social Behavior
The emphasis of this course is steering you toward a theoretical framework --a predictive framework-- for understanding animal social behavior. That predictive framework involves the understanding how natural selection shapes traits that enhance reproductive success. In this course, you will come to appreciate the importance of behavior for understanding how individuals can enhance their reproductive success.
How and why natural selection fashions animal social behavior is best understood by observing organisms in the ecological setting in which they live and reproduce. Thus for this summer, we will all become behavioral ecologists as we attempt to explore the fascinating social behaviors of the Herring Gull. Through our binoculars, we will take a close look at their mating biology, their contentious threats and wing fights with neighbors in defense of home turf, the remarkable communicative signals they use for survival and reproductive success, and their keen ability to recognize friend or foe, and behave appropriately.
Topics to be covered will include natural selection and behavior, levels of analysis, communication, levels of selection, territoriality, mating systems, animal cognition, kinship and infanticide. Methods of measuring behavior and designing experiments will be taught, and students will conduct individual research projects. Nobel Laureate Niko Tinbergen conducted the pioneering studies into the gull's fascinating social world. His book, The Herring Gull’s World, is our suggested reading for classic insight into gull behavior.