The resulting vibration causes the female to release her eggs for the male to fertilize. If the male fails to perform the last part of the ballet, the female will not lay her eggs; vibrating the female with a pencil, however, which she can plainly see is not a male stickleback, works perfectly well, although the male in this case, not having gone through the last stage of the ritual, refuses to fertilize the eggs and eats them instead. A second major discovery by ethologists is that many complex behaviors come prepackaged as motor programs-self-contained circuits able to direct the coordinated movements of many different muscles to accomplish a task. The dancing of sticklebacks, the stinging action of wasps, and the pecking of gull chicks are all motor programs.
The first motor program analyzed in much detail was the egg-rolling response of geese. When a goose sees an egg outside its nest, it stares at the egg, stretches its neck until its bill is just on the other side of the egg, and then gently rolls the egg back into the nest. At first glance this seems a thoughtful and intelligent piece of behavior, but it is a mechanical motor program; almost any smooth, rounded object will release the response. Furthermore, removal of the egg once the program has begun does not stop the goose from finishing its neck extension and delicately rolling the nonexistent object into the nest. Such a response is one of a special group of motor programs known as fixed-action patterns. Programs of this class are wholly innate, although they are frequently wired so that some of the movements are adjusted automatically to compensate for unpredictable contingencies, such as the roughness and slope of the ground the goose must nudge the egg across. Apparently, the possible complexity of such programs is almost unlimited; birds' nests and the familiar beautiful webs of orb-weaving spiders are examples. Another class of motor programs is learned. In the human species, walking, swimming, bicycle riding, and shoe tying, for example, begin as laborious efforts requiring full, conscious attention. After a time, however, these activities become so automatic that, like innate motor programs, they can be performed unconsciously and without normal feedback. This need for feedback in only the early stages of learning is widespread. Both songbirds and humans, for example, must hear themselves as they begin to vocalize, but once song or speech is mastered, deafness has little effect. The necessary motor programs have been wired into the system. CDrive The third general principle of ethology is drive. Animals know when to migrate, when to court one another, when to feed their young, and so on. In most animals these abilities are behavioral units that are switched on or off as appropriate. Geese, for example, will only roll eggs from about a week before egg laying until a week after the young have hatched.
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