Saturday, April 15, 2006

 

This Day in the History of Science

On this day in 1907 Nicholaas Tinbergen was born in the Netherlands. He later moved to England where he became an ethologist, a zoologist who studied the behavior of animals in their natural habitats. He later shared (with Konrad Lorenz and Karl von Frisch) the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1973, for their discoveries concerning "organization and elicitation of individual and social behavior patterns." He is known for his long-term field observations of the social patterns, courtship and mating behavior of seagulls in their natural habitat. Though gulls were his primary interest, his diverse studies also encompassed sand wasps and stickleback fish. He discovered super optimum triggers to animal behavior (red knitting needles, for example, with two white stripes caused juvenile gulls to peck at them far more often than perfect replicas of the adult gull heads, with just the one red spot on the beak).

His most elegant experiment came after watching a sand wasp bury stung prey with her larvae (and then, every time, buzz around the location before flying off for more prey). He wanted to know if the wasp was memorizing the location of the hidden nest from viewing the surroundings. Tinbergen placed several pine cones equidistant around the entrance of the nest. After the wasp left the nest, covered it with sand, and buzzed the area around the nest, Tinbergen moved the pine cones to surround just virgin sand. The wasp returned and began digging in the center of the pine cone circle, thus proving that she had indeed memorized the location of the nest from observation of surrounding landmarks.

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