Animal Stories

Runaway ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony Chaney
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Animal Behavior ◽  
Nazi Ideology ◽  
Konrad Lorenz

This chapter narrates Bateson's cultivation of Konrad Lorenz as a friend and colleague in the spring of 1966. The Austrian Lorenz was a famed expert on animal behavior and one of the fathers of ethology. Lorenz and Bateson shared a foundation in natural history and a dislike of behaviorism. These matters featured a debate among scientists over the usefulness of the term "instinct" and were specialized versions of a broader nature-nurture debate. Lorenz sent Bateson his newly-published masterpiece of popular ethology, On Aggression. Lorenz's argument in the book is summarized with examples from the behavior of cichlids, geese, and rats. The chapter touches on suspicions of Lorenz's early work as sympathetic to Nazi ideology and, in turn, suspicions of holist approaches to biology in general as politically reactionary. Bateson's engagement with On Aggression was contemporaneous with a reading of T. H. White's The Sword and the Stone, and the chapter explores the resonance between the two books. Both reflect a postwar rehabilitation of the animal as a symbol of brutality and amorality. They spoke to Cold War anxieties concerning whether aggression in humans was instinctive.

scholarly journals Forgotten treasures: the fate of data in animal behavior studies

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel S Caetano ◽  
Anita Aisenberg
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Behavioral Ecology ◽  
Animal Behavior ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Museum Specimens ◽  
Field Observations ◽  
Ecological Data ◽  
Data Archiving ◽  
Data Stewardship ◽  
Key Aspects

Published discussions on data stewardship often focus on standardized datasets whose reuse patterns are known. Improvements in stewardship of animal behavior data are virtually absent and lag behind other disciplines such as molecular biology and systematics. In this essay, we discuss best practices of three key aspects related to the collection and archival of behavioral data: data supporting published results; data collected from field observations; and the potential of museum specimens as source of data to animal behavior and ecology. To quantify how much data is shared in publications we reviewed selected journals in animal behavior and behavioral ecology. We found that only an extremely small proportion of the articles published in 2013 made even part of their data available. We discuss about the benefits of making data available, review resources available for data archiving and provide practical guidance for ethologists. We discuss and provide examples of the amount of ethological and ecological data that can be recorded during field observations. To investigate the potential of museum specimens as source of data, we surveyed researchers working in areas related to ecology, animal behavior, and systematics. Both ethologists and systematists agreed that natural history information stored in collections would be a valuable source of data. We make recommendations to enhance data collection and stewardship from the point of view of researchers in animal behavior sciences, considering the special characteristics of the discipline and the type of data that is often produced. We suggest that there is a large amount of crucial data about natural history, ecology and behavior that investigators could glean from collections. Although it is difficult to appreciate the relevance of data for future studies at the time of publication, such data may inspire fruitful opportunities that we cannot afford to lose.

scholarly journals Worker ants promote outbreeding by transporting young queens to alien nests

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mathilde Vidal ◽  
Florian Königseder ◽  
Julia Giehr ◽  
Alexandra Schrempf ◽  
Christophe Lucas ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Selection ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Animal Behavior ◽  
Social Evolution ◽  
Sexual Partners ◽  
Third Party ◽  
Natal Nest ◽  
Mating Partner ◽  
C Elegans ◽  
The Right

AbstractChoosing the right mating partner is one of the most critical decisions in the life of a sexually reproducing organism and is the basis of sexual selection. This choice is usually assumed to be made by one or both of the sexual partners. Here, we describe a system in which a third party – the siblings – promote outbreeding by their sisters: workers of the tiny ant Cardiocondyla elegans carry female sexuals from their natal nest over several meters and drop them in the nest of another, unrelated colony to promote outbreeding with wingless, stationary males. Workers appear to choose particular recipient colonies into which they transfer numerous female sexuals. Assisted outbreeding and indirect female choice in the ant C. elegans are comparable to human matchmaking and suggest a hitherto unknown aspect of natural history – third party sexual selection. Our study highlights that research at the intersection between social evolution and reproductive biology might reveal surprising facets of animal behavior.

Narrative Failures

Anthropos ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 114 (2) ◽  
pp. 547-562
Author(s):  
Jennifer Way
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Fine Arts ◽  
State Department ◽  
National Museum ◽  
Free World ◽  
South Vietnam ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
American State

This article considers what an unstudied collection of Vietnamese handicraft owned by the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History reveals about its collecting culture and, conversely, what the collecting culture discloses about the collection. I show how the collecting culture’s activities intersected with American State Department efforts to bring postcolonial South Vietnam into the Free World during the Cold War. Attention to the Smithsonian National Collection of Fine Arts’ exhibition, “Art and Archaeology of Vietnam. Asian Crossroad of Cultures,” also reveals narratives of power and knowledge associated with the collecting culture. Ultimately, these failed the collection by leaving it disregarded.

"Something of Interest about Ourselves": Natural History and the Evolutionary Hierarchy at Taronga Zoological Park

2007 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-67
Author(s):  
Natalie Lloyd
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Evolutionary Theory ◽  
Animal Behavior ◽  
New World ◽  
Moral Improvement ◽  
Nonhuman Animals ◽  
In Captivity ◽  
Zoological Park

AbstractSherbourne Le Souef, a director of Sydney's Taronga Zoological Park during the first part of the twentieth century, utilized his observations of nonhuman animals living in captivity to write on the "actions, reactions and traits common to [humans] and animals" (Le Souef, 1930, p. 598). Le Souef's writings reflect his search beyond the human will for "the genesis of man's actions and reactions" (p. 598) and his appreciation of evolutionary theory where the idea of hierarchy was maintained. Similar to William T. Hornaday, a director of the zoological gardens in New York, Le Souef sought the moral improvement of zoo audiences through encouraging observation of nonhuman animals. More broadly, he argued for the relevance of his own observations to the general progress of the peoples of the new world. This paper identifies how notions of animal behavior were understood to indicate social, cultural, spiritual, and species hierarchies.

scholarly journals Forgotten treasures: the fate of data in animal behavior studies

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel S Caetano ◽  
Anita Aisenberg
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Behavioral Ecology ◽  
Animal Behavior ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Museum Specimens ◽  
Field Observations ◽  
Ecological Data ◽  
Data Archiving ◽  
Data Stewardship ◽  
Key Aspects

Published discussions on data stewardship often focus on standardized datasets whose reuse patterns are known. Improvements in stewardship of animal behavior data are virtually absent and lag behind other disciplines such as molecular biology and systematics. In this essay, we discuss best practices of three key aspects related to the collection and archival of behavioral data: data supporting published results; data collected from field observations; and the potential of museum specimens as source of data to animal behavior and ecology. To quantify how much data is shared in publications we reviewed selected journals in animal behavior and behavioral ecology. We found that only an extremely small proportion of the articles published in 2013 made even part of their data available. We discuss about the benefits of making data available, review resources available for data archiving and provide practical guidance for ethologists. We discuss and provide examples of the amount of ethological and ecological data that can be recorded during field observations. To investigate the potential of museum specimens as source of data, we surveyed researchers working in areas related to ecology, animal behavior, and systematics. Both ethologists and systematists agreed that natural history information stored in collections would be a valuable source of data. We make recommendations to enhance data collection and stewardship from the point of view of researchers in animal behavior sciences, considering the special characteristics of the discipline and the type of data that is often produced. We suggest that there is a large amount of crucial data about natural history, ecology and behavior that investigators could glean from collections. Although it is difficult to appreciate the relevance of data for future studies at the time of publication, such data may inspire fruitful opportunities that we cannot afford to lose.

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