New purple crab species found in Philippines

Four new species of freshwater crab, bright purple in colour, have been discovered in the biologically diverse but ecologically-threatened Philippines, the man who found them said Saturday.

Cat shelter findings: Less stress with box access

Out of all those cat videos that keep your eyes glued to the screen far longer than you would care to acknowledge, you may have seen some showing little and big cats trying their best to snuggle into big and too-little cardboard ...

Life exploded on Earth after slow rise of oxygen

It took 100 million years for oxygen levels in the oceans and atmosphere to increase to the level that allowed the explosion of animal life on Earth about 600 million years ago, according to a UCL-led study funded by the ...

Research shows jackdaws can recognise individual human faces

When you're prey, being able to spot and assess the threat posed by potential predators is of life-or-death importance. In a paper published today in Animal Behaviour, researchers from the University of Cambridge's Department ...

Let's talk about gay penguins: Munich zoo joins Pride week

Organisers of this year's Gay Pride week in Munich have a group of rather wild partners—penguins, giraffes and lions at the city zoo where tours are being run about same-sex love in the animal kingdom.

Evolutionary reasons for believing in luck

How far will you go to avoid bad luck? Do you avoid walking under ladders, carry lucky charms, or perhaps instead perform special rituals before important meetings or sporting events?

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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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