ETHOLOGY. MECHANISMS, ONTOGENESIS, FUNCTION AND EVOLUTION OF ANIMAL BEHAVIOUR

How do the brain and hormones influence behaviour? How do animals get their bearings and communicate with each other? How does behaviour evolve under the influence of genes and environment? Why do animals sometimes compete with each other and cooperate at other times? How do they choose mates, and how do they raise their young? How has the brain and social behaviour evolved through evolution? How can the knowledge of behaviour help us protect wild and domestic animals or model human behavioural disorders? These questions are answered by ethology, the science of animal behaviour. The new textbook, Ethology, explains animal behaviour at four levels: at the level of mechanisms (i.e. how behaviour is governed by the interplay of external stimuli and the animal's internal state), at the level of ontogenesis (how it is shaped by the interaction between genotype and acquired experience), at the level of function (how behaviour helps animals survive and pass genes to offspring), and at the level of evolution (how behaviour varies in animals belonging to different phylogenetic branches). The book is supplemented by a section on the history of ethology and on applied ethology, and includes comprehensive chapters that present the behaviour of selected groups of animals: cockroaches, mole rats, cuckoos, spiders, bats and humans.