Neuroethology - Philosophy

Philosophy

Neuroethology is an integrative approach to solving problems in animal behavior, drawing upon several disciplines. Often, neuroethologists choose to study animals that are “specialists” in a particular type of behavior the researcher wishes to study (i.e. honeybees and their social behavior, bat echolocation, owl sound localization). The idea that an ideal animal exists for studying specific behaviors is based on Krogh's principle. The neuroethological approach stems from the idea that animals' nervous systems have evolved to address problems of sensing and acting in certain environmental niches. Central to the dogma of neuroethology, therefore, is the idea that nervous systems are best understood in the context of the problems they have evolved to solve.

The scope of neuroethological inquiry might be summarized by Jörg-Peter Ewert, a pioneer of neuroethology, when he considers the types of questions central to neuroethology in his 1980 introductory text to the field:

1. How are stimuli detected by an organism?
2. How are environmental stimuli in the external world represented in the nervous system?
3. How is information about a stimulus acquired, stored and recalled by the nervous system?
4. How is a behavioral pattern encoded by neural networks?
5. How is behavior coordinated and controlled by the nervous system?
6. How can the ontogenetic development of behavior be related to neural mechanisms?

Often central to addressing questions in neuroethology are comparative methodologies, drawing upon knowledge about related organisms’ nervous systems, anatomies, life histories, behaviors and environmental niches. While it is not unusual for many types of neurobiology experiments to give rise to behavioral questions, many neuroethologists often begin their research programs by observing a species’ behavior in its natural environment. Other approaches to understanding nervous systems include the systems identification approach, popular in engineering. The idea is to stimulate the system using a non-natural stimulus with certain properties. The system's response to the stimulus may be used to analyze the operation of the system. Such an approach is useful for linear systems, but the nervous system is notoriously nonlinear, and neuroethologists argue that such an approach is limited. This argument is supported by experiments in the auditory system. These experiments show that neural responses to complex sounds, like social calls, can not be predicted by the knowledge gained from studying the responses due to pure tones (one of the non-natural stimuli favored by auditory neurophysiologists). This is because of the non-linearity of the system.

Modern neuroethology is largely influenced by the research techniques used. Neural approaches are necessarily very diverse, as is evident through the variety of questions asked, measuring techniques used, relationships explored, and model systems employed. Techniques utilized since 1984 include the use of intracellular dyes, which make maps of identified neurons possible, and the use of brain slices, which bring vertebrate brains into better observation through intracellular electrodes (Hoyle 1984). Currently, other fields toward which neuroethology may be headed include computational neuroscience, molecular genetics, neuroendocrinology and epigenetics. The existing field of neural modeling may also expand into neuroethological terrain, due to its practical uses in robotics. In all this, neuroethologists must use the right level of simplicity to effectively guide research towards accomplishing the goals of neuroethology.

Critics of neuroethology might consider it a branch of neuroscience concerned with ‘animal trivia’. Though neuroethological subjects tend not to be traditional neurobiological model systems (i.e. Drosophila, C. elegans, or Danio rerio), neuroethological approaches emphasizing comparative methods have uncovered many concepts central to neuroscience as a whole, such as lateral inhibition, coincidence detection, and sensory maps. The discipline of neuroethology has also discovered and explained the only vertebrate behavior for which the entire neural circuit has been described: the electric fish jamming avoidance response. Beyond its conceptual contributions, neuroethology makes indirect contributions to advancing human health. By understanding simpler nervous systems, many clinicians have used concepts uncovered by neuroethology and other branches of neuroscience to develop treatments for devastating human diseases.