Encyclopaedia

People have probably always been fascinated by the behavior of animals. Indeed an understanding of the behavior of prey animals must have been essential to our early ancestors; their paintings on the walls of caves suggest that they could have been fairly familiar with behavioral concepts such as herd size and migration. The earliest stock-farmers would have needed to understand the behavior of the charges in their care just as their modern counterparts do today. Some members of society (and even some biology students) may wrongly think of the study of animal behavior in an academic context as being a soft science or even an easy option. However, I hope to show you in this introduction to the subject that it is an important and rigorous science and that it has a clear application to some of the problems that we face in the modern world. Cephalopod inking behavior : Many species of octopus and squid are known to exhibit a particularly effective behavior that enables them to escape fro...