Abstract
Much of the behavior of animals constitutes a set of adaptive responses to the physical world in which animals live. The relevant physical parameters are, far more numerous than biologists commonly recognize. And the particular parameters relevant in a given situation depend strongly on the size of the organism in question; here our biases as unusually large creatures seriously compromise our facility for any intuitive recognition of just what factors might be important. Parameters such as pressure, temperature, humidity, and fluid motion take on quite different significance, both quantitatively and qualitatively, to organisms of more “ordinary” size than ourselves. But recognition of what might be important to a particular animal requires not an elaborate training in physics, but rather some self- education in how one thinks about the world encountered by the organisms one studies.
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© 1981 Plenum Press, New York
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Vogel, S. (1981). Behavior and the Physical World of an Animal. In: Bateson, P.P.G., Klopfer, P.H. (eds) Perspectives in Ethology. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-7575-7_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-7575-7_9
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