Ethology, the biological study of animal behavior, was founded by Konrad Lorenz, Niko Tinbergen, and Karl von Frisch, who shared the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Unlike behaviorist psychology that focused on learned responses in laboratory settings, ethology insists on studying animals in their natural environments, asking four questions about every behavior: its causation, development, function, and evolutionary history.
The field reveals extraordinary behavioral adaptations — from the stereotyped egg-rolling movements of greylag geese to the waggle dances that encode the distance and direction of food sources in honeybee colonies. Optimal foraging theory applies economic reasoning to predict how animals should allocate their time across food patches, while Hamilton's rule (rB > C) explains the evolution of altruism through kin selection. These simulations let you explore the quantitative models underlying animal behavior and witness how evolution shapes the remarkable diversity of behavioral strategies in nature.