What is Neuroethology?

Neuroethology is the study of the neural mechanisms of naturally-occurring animal behavior. Neuroethology is an integrative science. At its best, information concerning an organism's evolutionary and life history, the adaptive significance of the behavior, and the relevant biomechanics / biophysics are combined to understand the neural mechanisms for the control of the behavior in question.

Neuroethologists typically choose to study animals with discrete behavioral and neural adaptations. The best known vertebrate examples are echolocation in bats, electric sense in certain fish, sound localization in owls, and song learning and production in oscine birds, among others. Many of the best examples are invertebrate systems, including the stomatogastric system in lobsters, flight in flies and locusts, steering in crickets and cockroaches, and navigation by ants and honeybees.

The study of these specialized systems has proven to be enormously productive, particularly in elucidating neural codes for behavior and the organization of computational maps. These data are widely relevant because the neural systems that control these highly specialized behaviors nonetheless employ the same basic principles of neural organization and cellular mechanisms that are used in the control of all behaviors.