AI decodes flatback turtle behavior in Roebuck Bay

The flatback turtle (Natator depressus) is endemic to northern Australia and although females come ashore to lay their eggs, little is known about the species' behavior at sea.

Drones and other tech play major roles in saving our wildlife

From drones locating koalas hidden in treetops to recording little penguin acoustics and night-time movements on film, Flinders University researchers have shown the importance of technologies such as cameras and AI to help ...

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Ethology

Ethology (from Greek: ἦθος, ethos, "character"; and -λογία, -logia) is the scientific study of animal behavior, and a sub-topic of zoology (not to be confused with ethnology, which compares and contrasts different human cultures).

Although many naturalists have studied aspects of animal behavior throughout history, the modern discipline of ethology is generally considered to have begun with the work during the 1930s of Dutch biologist Nikolaas Tinbergen and Austrian biologist Konrad Lorenz, joint winners of the 1973 Nobel Prize in medicine. Ethology is a combination of laboratory and field science, with a strong relation to certain other disciplines — e.g., neuroanatomy, ecology, evolution. Ethologists are interested typically in a behavioral process rather than in a particular animal group and often study one type of behavior (e.g. aggression) in a number of unrelated animals.

The desire to understand animals has made ethology a rapidly growing topic, and since the turn of the 21st century, many prior understandings related to diverse fields such as animal communication, personal symbolic name use, animal emotions, animal culture and learning, and even sexual conduct, long thought to be well understood, have been modified, as have new fields such as neuroethology.

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