What is the mechanism that allows birds to build nests, beavers to build dams, or spiders to spin webs – without anyone teaching them how?

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Those are awfully complex structures, I couldn’t make one!

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Anonymous 0 Comments

So it is a bit of a complex topic and I am far from an expert. But for many of these complex behaviours they are something known as Fixed Action Patterns. Especially a series of actions or responses to a specific stimulus which will always be performed the same way. These are generally genetically “known” meaning an animal raised totally independently of any others or ever taught will still perform the behaviour if presented with the stimuli.

For example with beavers. They make two kinds of dams, those they live in and those they use to block water. Both are instinctual behaviours. You can “trick” a beaver into building a dam on the land by simply placing a speaker playing sounds of running water. This noise stimulus will cause the beaver to essentially automatically build a dam on top of the speaker.

It is important to note these behaviors did not just appear. One day a rodent didn’t just decide to build a dam and became what we know of beavers. But instead the current dam building behavior is likely the result of numerous smaller behaviours which came together to result in the current fixed action pattern of dam building.

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