My AP Biology Thoughts

Unit 8 Episode #19

Welcome to My AP Biology Thoughts podcast, my name is Adrienne and I am your host for episode #19 called Unit 8 Ecology: Animal Behavior Part 1. Today we will be discussing learned behaviors including associative learning, trial and error, habituation, observational learning, and insight and how it ties into the greater picture of ecology.

Segment 1: Introduction to animal learned behaviors

General introduction

• Animal Behaviors: how animals interact with each other and their environment
• Learned behaviors: behaviors developed through experience or are taught

Definition of Animal Learned Behaviors

• Associative learning: learning to correlate a stimulus with a consequence or effect
• Trial and error/operant conditioning: learning to associate a behavior with a reward or punishments
• BF Skinner theory: belief that learning and changes in behavior are caused by an individual’s response to stimuli. The response either leads to a consequence or reward and over time, it reinforces/alters how an organism responds.
• Habituation: decrease in response to a repeated stimulus that causes little effects/impact, enables animals to disregard unimportant stimuli 
• Insight: uses reason and past experiences to solve problems and form conclusions

Segment 2: Example of animal learned behaviors

• Associative: Pavlov’s dogs, giving dogs steak and ringing the bell leads the dog to start salivating over time when the bell is rung because it associates it with steak
• Trial and error/operant conditioning: in the Skinner box, a mouse learns to press the level because the pressing level behavior leads to a reward (food pellet)
• Habituation: over time baby birds will stop fearing leaves falling since they learn that it poses no harm
• Observational learning: baby wolves wolves observe and copy the behavior of adult wolves when they hunt which teaches them predatory skills and effective hunting behaviors such as hunting in packs and surrounding its prey
• Insight: Jane Goodall observed that chimpanzees use twigs as a tool to “fish” for food
• They would use the twig and poke a hole into a termite mound and eat the insects clinging to it. 
• Over time, they have been seen making several different types of tools such as sharpening sticks for hunting and stones as hammers to crack open nuts.

Segment 3: Digging Deeper into animal learned behaviors

How does this topic fit into the greater picture of ecology?

• Ecology: how organisms interact with one another and with their physical environment
• Behaviors are learned through external stimulus from the environment
• Seen in associative learning, trial and error, habituation, and insight
• Abiotic factors such as food and water lead organisms to gain learned behaviors
• Behaviors are learned through organism interactions with another
• Seen in observational learning
• Changes in behavior due to physical environment: when the environment changes, learned behaviors will change in order to adapt
• Behaviors that increase fitness will allow individuals with that behavior to have a greater chance of passing it on to their offspring. Over time, the behavior will dominate in the species since organisms learn that it is beneficial to their survival

Thank you for listening to this episode of My AP Biology Thoughts.   For more student-ran podcasts and digital content, make sure that you visit www.hvspn.com.  See you next time!

Music Credits:

• "Ice Flow" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
• Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
•  http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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