"[SOUND]" "Hello, I'm Raoul Mulder from the University of Melbourne." "Welcome to our course on animal behavior." "In this video, I want to explain what this course is all about." "Animal behavior is an incredibly active research area, with really exciting new studies coming out every day." "It's also a tremendously diverse field because of course animal behavior can be studied from a huge variety of different perspectives." "Everything from the way hormones or our neurological circuitry influence the way we behave, to the ultimate evolutionary explanations for particular types of behavior." "Animal behavior can also be very applied in nature, involving domesticated animals or farm animals, dogs and cats." "In this course we'll be talking mainly about the behavior or wild animals in their natural habitat - the kinds of studies that fuel natural history documentaries." "And for the most part we'll be taking a strongly evolutionary approach to the questions that we try to answer in this course." "Trying to understand why animals behave in particular ways, rather than mechanics of how that behavior comes about." "Let me give you some examples of what I mean." "I'm standing in front of a lake which just happens to be right in the middle of a city." "My home city of Melbourne." "And all around me, animals are doing interesting things." "They're behaving in ways that might make a student of animal behavior curious." "Take this beautiful black water bird with a red bill for example." "Most people enjoying their walk around the lake might be satisfied to know what species it is." "It's an Australian Black swan." "A fascinating reverse image of the White swan that most people are familiar with." "But spent a bit more time watching the birds and a host of interesting questions come up that have to do with how the birds are behaving." "Look at the way the swan feeds for example." "Notice how sometimes it skims its beak along the surface" " we call that dabbling." "But at other times it tips its whole body forward with its legs comically waddling in the air" " we call that upending." "Why does a swan sometimes feed in one way and sometimes in another way?" "Why has it chosen this particular spot to forage?" "Why is this one feeding by itself, whereas the others are feeding in a flock?" "When it's upending in the way that you've just noticed, isn't it making itself awfully vulnerable to predators?" "Another set of interesting questions arises when we watch the swans interacting with each other." "These males are engaging in what we call a parallel swim." "They swim alongside each other." "They arch their necks." "They ruffle their feathers to make themselves look as big and as intimidating as possible, and they then swim alongside each, other until one male decides he no longer has the stomach for the contest and swims away." "What are these males doing?" "It looks remarkably like a behavior that's also performed by gazelles and other antelopes, parallel walking." "And in those species, it's a form of polite fighting." "It's a way for the two males to size each up before they decide whether or not they want to engage in a fight." "Why do animals so often resolve conflicts with these polite fights rather than fighting to the death?" "And what is that the males are assessing during those encounters?" "In the case of the swans, is it the overall size of the male, or is there something more interesting, something more subtle that indicates the male's fighting prowess?" "Perhaps the size or the shape of the white stripe on the beak, or the overall color of the beak, or may be even the ruffle of curled feathers that they have on their wings?" "The study of animal behavior is all about satisfying our curiosity by finding ways to try and answer some of those questions, usually by testing alternative explanations, or hypothesis for the behavior in a rigid scientific frame work." "And to my mind, what makes this subject so enjoyable, is that the tools we need to do that are no more complicated than a notebook, a set of binoculars, a little bit of patience and an inquiring mind and healthy dose of scientific skepticism." "During the course, we are going to give you an opportunity to meet some of the researchers that are doing some of the most original, interesting, and exciting work in animal behavior at the moment." "And we hope that that will give you a sense of just how interesting and diverse a typical day at the office is for a researcher in animal behavior." "And we want to give you the opportunity to ask your own questions and discover for yourself how much ingenuity, creativity, and great thinking has gone into the amazing discoveries that fuel the natural history documentaries we all enjoy watching." "So welcome to the course." "We're really looking forward to sharing what we know about animal behavior and of course, learning from you in turn."