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What kind of information would you find on an ethogram?
An ethogram is a list of species-specific behaviors describing the elements and function of each behavior. Normally, the best ethograms are functional; they are organized into categories that reflect meaningful distinctions to the animal.
What is an animal ethogram?
An ethogram is a record of behaviors exhibited by an animal used in ethology, the scientific and objective study of animal behavior. Ethology is a sub-topic of zoology, the study of animal biology. Researchers make a list of behaviors based on sample observations of animal groups or individual animals over time.
Why do we record animal Behaviour?
The behaviour is observed, recorded, and analyzed in order to help us understand the natural behaviour of a species, or a species’ behavioural repertoire.
How is animal behavior measured?
The gold standard for recording behavior is to track an animal and note the precise start and end time for each behavior, known as continuous observation. A labor-saving alternative is observe animals at set time intervals to record a snapshot of what they are doing at that moment, known as instantaneous sampling.
How is a behavior ethogram defined?
An ethogram is a catalogue or inventory of behaviours or actions exhibited by an animal used in ethology. The behaviours in an ethogram are usually defined to be mutually exclusive and objective, avoiding subjectivity and functional inference as to their possible purpose.
Why is an ethogram important?
Designing ethograms is crucial to the study of animal behavior because it delineates the scope of analysis and often guides the course of future research (Bekoff 1979; MacNulty et al. 2007). Without such ethograms, animal behaviors are open to interpretation and studies of behavioral ecology may become ambiguous.
What is Catalogued by an ethogram?
The ethogram is a catalogue or dictionary of the discrete behaviors typically employed by a species. The included behaviors are sufficiently stereotyped that an observer may record the number of acts, or the amount of time engaged in the behaviors.
What is the purpose of an ethogram?
Ethograms can be used to detect the occurrence or prevalence of abnormal behaviours (e.g. stereotypies, feather pecking, tail-biting), normal behaviours (e.g. comfort behaviours), departures from the ethogram of ancestral species and the behaviour of captive animals upon release into a natural environment.