Ethology
Part of a Series on
Zoology
Branches of Zoology
Anthropology · Anthrozoology
Apiology · Arachnology
Arthropodology · Cetology
Conchology · Entomology
Ethology · Helminthology
Herpetology · Ichthyology
Malacology · Mammalogy
Myrmecology · Nematology
Neuroethology · Ornithology
Paleozoology · Planktology
Primatology
Notable Zoologists
Georges Cuvier · Charles Darwin
William Kirby · Carolus Linnaeus
Konrad Lorenz · Thomas Say
Alfred Russel Wallace · more...
History
pre-Darwin
post-Darwin
Ethology (from Greek: ἦθος, ethos, "character"; and -λογία, -
logia) is the scientific study of animal behavior, and a
branch of zoology (not to be confused with ethnology).
Although many naturalists have studied aspects of
animal behavior through the centuries, the modern dis-
cipline of ethology is usually considered to have arisen
with the work in 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
strong ties to certain other disciplines — e.g., neuroana-
tomy, ecology, evolution. Ethologists are typically inter-
ested 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 the animal world has made
ethology a rapidly growing field, 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 revolutionized, as have new
fields such as neuroethology.
Etymology
The term "ethology" is derived from the Greek word
"èthos" (ήθος), meaning "character". Other words de-
rived from the Greek word "ethos" include "ethics" and
"ethical". The term was first popularized in English by
the American myrmecologist William Morton Wheeler
in 1902. (An earlier, slightly d