Where Is Ethology Heading? An Invitation for Collective Metadisciplinary Discussion

Abstract

Many factors can impact the advancement of scientific disciplines. In the study of animal behavior and cognition (i.e., Ethology), a lack of consensus about definitions or the emergence of some current events and inventions, among other aspects, may challenge the discipline’s grounds within the next decades. A collective metadisciplinary discussion may help in envisioning the future to come. For that purpose, I elaborated an online questionnaire about the level of consensus and the researchers’ ways of doing in seven areas: Discipline name and concepts, species, Umwelt, technology, data, networking, and the impact of sociocultural and ecological factors. I recruited the opinion of almost a hundred of colleagues worldwide (N = 98), both junior and seniors, working both in the wild and in the lab. While the results were pitted against the literature, general conclusions should be taken with caution and considered as a first attempt in exploring the state of the discipline from the researchers’ perspective: There is no unanimity for the discipline’s name; 71.4% of the researchers reported there is limited consensus in the definition of relevant concepts (i.e., culture, cognition); primate species still predominate in publications whereas the species selection criteria is sometimes based on fascination, chance, or funding opportunities rather than on biocentric questions; 56.1% of the apparatuses employed do not resemble species’ ecological problems, and current tech needs would be solved by fostering collaboration with engineers. Finally, embracing the Open Science paradigm, supporting networking efforts, and promoting diversity in research teams may help in gathering further knowledge in the area. Some suggestions are proposed to overcome the aforementioned problems in this contemporary analysis of our discipline.

Ecology, ethology, and evolution in the Anthropocene

“…This is concerning and needs remedy. As discipline-specific vocabulary can impede effective communication, ethologists should perhaps consider collectively what term(s) should be used to best describe their field of study ( Bueno-Guerra, 2021 ).…”

Some dogs can find the payoff-dominant outcome in the Assurance game

“…Although these studies suggest that species play the game differently, further research is needed to shed light on whether animals recognize that the decisions taken by their partners affect the outcomes in these games. Reaching that goal requires comparing the performance of species from very different taxa, 33 , 34 but so far most of the research on the Assurance game and other economic games has focused on non-human primates. Additionally, the relative simplicity of the Assurance game makes it a valuable tool to study species untested in this type of economic game.…”

50 years of the Nobel Prize to Lorenz, Tinbergen, and von Frisch: integrating behavioral function into an ethology for the 21st century

“…This contrasts with the flurry of papers and book chapters published to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Tinbergen's famous "four whys" paper. Although "ethology" was the term of choice for referring to the biological study of animal behavior in the 1960s and 1970s, today many researchers eschew it and instead use other terms, such as "animal behavior", "behavioral ecology", or "behavioral biology" (Taborsky, 2006a;Hogan and Bolhuis, 2009;Bateson, 2012;Drickamer, 2019;Bueno-Guerra, 2021;Bolhuis et al, 2022;Kappeler, 2022). None of the major animal behavior textbooks published in the last two decades include the term "ethology" in their titles, and some make only a passing reference to ethology, often just for the sake of historical completeness (e.g., Rubenstein and Alcock, 2019;Nordell and Valone, 2021).…”