Renee Miller, Ph.D. (Instructor)
Office: Meliora 106
E-mail:
Phone: 276-4024
Office Hours: Monday 1-3 or by appointment
Course Intent
Neuroethology is the study of animal behavior in terms of its causes and adaptive value. We will consider a variety of animal behaviors in terms of their ultimate evolutionary origins and proximate mechanistic determinants. The course will be broadly divided into two sections, one covering Mating and Reproductive Behaviors (Courtship, inter-species signals, mating systems, etc.) and the other covering Survival Behaviors (foraging, predator/prey interactions, habitat selection, migration, etc.). To start the semester, we will set the stage for analysis of these topics by learning about or reviewing natural selection, genetics, neuronal control of behavior, hormonal control of behavior, and the cyclic nature of behavior.
The course will be about 75% lecture based and 25% small group and discussion based. It is my belief that a fuller appreciation of how and why animals exhibit certain behaviors can be achieved by evaluating different types of hypotheses and experimental data. We will therefore spend significant class time working through discussion questions from the textbook, as well as reading and analyzing primary research papers. Since ethology mostly aims to describe animal behavior in a natural state instead of a laboratory, experimental design can be tricky. Many of the observations we will study are open to multiple interpretations, which I hope to replicate in our classroom.
Reading Assignments
The textbook for this course is Animal Behavior by John Alcock, 9th Edition, Sinauer Associates. The reading assignments are found on the lecture schedule. We will be covering the material in the book in a very different order than presented by John Alcock. You are welcome to read ahead at any time, but please be sure to do the assigned reading PRIOR to coming to class. In most cases, I ask only that you've read a portion of a single chapter. I will post lecture slides prior to class as often as possible (aiming for the afternoon before), although this means there may occasionally be small changes. If you like to take notes on the slides, please save paper and use the 3-slide per page format. Thank you.
Additionally, I will post pdf files for the primary research papers to be discussed in class at least one week prior to the discussion. Everyone should read these papers at least twice and come prepared to discuss in detail the methods, questions, results, and interpretations.
Evaluation
There will be four exams, each worth 15% of your final grade, distributed throughout the semester (see lecture schedule and below). There will be a final project worth 20% of the grade which will require you to select a behavior that interests you (from nature or from the textbook) that we have not covered in detail and write a proposal for how you would go about studying it. Briefly, you will explain what the behavior is and what species, sex, age animal exhibits it. Hypothesize how the behavior evolved and what its adaptive value might be. Propose experiments to test your hypotheses. Speculate about the results and how you would interpret them. State some alternative hypotheses and briefly describe how you could test distinguish between them. I will provide more detailed instructions on the project later in the semester. Finally, the remaining 20% of your grade will come from class participation during discussions, journal readings, and questions.