Fixed Action Patterns, Altruism, and Learning

This video explains fixed action patterns, altruism, and learning in animals. *** If there are any pictures used in this video, they are NOT MINE and I will not take credit for them. *** TRANSCRIPT: In this video we’re going to go over what fixed action patterns are, altruism, and ways that animals can learn. It seems like a lot, but it’ll turn out to be quite simple. So first of all, fixed action patterns are motions that organisms go through and they’re always carried out to completion. They’re pretty much instinctive actions, and a common example of this is with the stickleback fish. Whenever one of these male sticklebacks sees another male coming into its territory, the red underbelly of the other male will trigger it to attack. Even if there’s just a piece of wood with a bit of red, the stickleback will attack it. The color red in this situation would be the sign stimulus, which is something that initiates a fixed action pattern. Alright, moving on to altruism. This is basically when an individual risks its life in order to preserve the fitness of its family. In biology, we’ve seen that organisms reproduce in order to pass on their traits and keep their population from extinction. That’s why altruism is contradictory in a way: if an organism’s goal is to keep the population going through its own reproductive fitness, why would it sacrifice itself for others? Well, we usually see altruistic behavior amongst family or colony members. One example of this would be of the vervet monkey. When a predator comes nearby, one of the monkeys usually makes a call to alarm the other monkeys that a harmful presence is close. At the same time, it’s calling attention to itself, making it easier for the predator to locate that specific monkey. This selfless act actually helps the monkey, though, even though the poor thing might end up dying. Since its family members are all here, and its family has some of its genes, this specific monkey’s genetic material won’t be lost forever; it’ll just be transferred to more generations indirectly. Next up is how animals learn. One concept that’s kind of under this whole umbrella of animal learning is “imprinting”, and it refers to what the animal absorbs during a certain period of time in its early life. The example that’s always brought up is the one where a zoologist named Konrad Lorenz carried out an experiment with ducks. By being the first thing that newly hatched ducklings saw, the ducklings followed him and thought that he was their mother for the rest of their lives. Through this, we see that imprinting is an irreversible process and the bond that forms within that critical period must be made during that length of time, or else, the imprinting won’t be successful. Let’s go back to the concept map of learning. So we have the umbrella of learning, and imprinting branched under it. One more branch that I’m going to add is associative learning, which is when animals learn to associate one thing with another. This further divides into two types: classical conditioning and operant conditioning. Classical conditioning is when you introduce a stimulus before the organism carries out a reaction. For example, Pavlov, who was a physiologist, knew that dogs salivate in the presence of food. Using this information, he trained dogs to salivate upon hearing a bell. He did this by ringing a bell and then giving them food multiple times so that the dogs would associate the bell with food; therefore, each time the bell rang, the dogs started salivating. Finally we have operant conditioning. Some books describe this as learning through trial and error. So you can think of it like trying new foods. You pick up something you’ve never tasted before, try it, and decide from there whether it’s good or bad. Clearly, if it tastes disgusting, you’re not going to go near it again, and you’ve associated that particular piece of food with a negative reaction. Any other animal behaviors that are learned through this trial and error aspect are also considered learned through operant conditioning.