Ethology

Ethology, also known as Animal Behaviour, is the branch of Biology that studies the way animals interact with each other, and the environment.

The favourite areas of investigation are communication, instinct, learning, mating and social interactions.

Modern Ethology is acknowledged to have a start in the 1930's with the work of the dutch biologist Nikolaas Tinbergen and the austrians Konrad Lorenz and Karl von Frisch on the organization and elicitation of individual and sicial behaviour patterns in animals, winning the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology

Nowadays, ethology has been starting to be integrated with other branches of Biology to, more easily, explain some of the more complex processes. New fields as Neuroethology, Sociophysiology or Ethoecology have been in the vanguard of investigation.

One of the most recently debated subjects is Altruism.