Ethologist case studies

Dian Fossey
1. Studied social behaviour in apes.
  1. Fossey studied mountain Gorillas in Africa between 1967 and 1985
  2. Fossey, like Goodall, spent time with the Gorillas in their natural habitat- she watched the animals to see how they behaved and recorded what they saw
  3. Gorillas are social animals (animals that live in groups) and that is what Fossey saw
  4. E.g. The Gorillas worked together to find food, groomed each other and warned the others of potential predators
Jane Goodall
1. Studied social behaviour in apes.
  1. Goodall studied chimpanzees in Tanzania between 1960 and 2005
  2. Goodall, like Fossey, spent time with the chimpanzees in their natural habitat- she watched the animals to see how they behaved and recorded what they saw
  3. Chimpanzees are social animals (animals that live in groups) and that is what Goodall saw
  4. E.g. The chimpanzees worked together to find food, groomed each other and warned the others of potential predators
Konrad Lorenz
1. Studied imprinting in goose chicks.
  1. Looked at how baby birds like ducklings recognise their mother and learn to follow her around
  2. He took 2 groups of eggs: 1 group was hatched by their own mother, the other was hatched in an incubator
  3. The first moving object that the geese saw, would be their mother, that's why they would follow her around. This is what happened to the first group of eggs
  4. The first moving object that group 2 saw was Lorenz. The ducklings thought that he was their mother and followed him around- this is imprinting.
Nikolaas Tinbergen
1. Studied innate behaviour in gulls.
  1. Newly hatched gull chicks know how to peck at their parent's beak to ask for food.
  2. Tinbergen showed the chicks different coloured spots on a cardboard gull to see if the chicks pecked at it
  3. Gulls have a red spot on the beak
  4. The majority of the chicks pecked at the red spot on the gull
Ethology
1. Ethology is the study of animal behaviour. Experiments are usually taken under the animal's natural habitat.
  1. A person who studies animal behaviour is called an ethologist

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Ethologist case studies

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	Created by Dan Peachey over 9 years ago