Species-typical behavior

The ethological concept of species-typical behavior is based on the premise that certain behavioral similarities are shared by almost all members of a species. Some of these behaviors are unique to certain species, but to be 'species-typical,' they do not have to be unique - they simply have to be characteristic of that species. To understand the importance of species-typical behavior, think about an animal that looks exactly like a dog, but meows, refuses to play fetch, and climbs trees. It's not surprising that humans would find this animal confusing; we expect an animal that looks a certain way to act a certain way, and we associate those behaviors with that animal (e.g. we associate the practice of meowing with cats).

Species-typical behaviors are almost always a product of nervous systems, meaning that they're created and influenced by species' genetic code and social and natural environment; this implies that they are strongly influenced by evolution. The phenomenon of the breast crawl is a classic example of this: the vast majority of human newborns, when placed on a reclined mother’s abdomen, will find and begin to suckle on one of the mother’s breasts without any assistance.

Such species-typical behaviors can be tied to certain structures of the brain. To prove this point, Murphy, MacLean, and Hamilton (1981) gave hamsters brain lesions at birth, which destroy certain brain structures. They discovered that, while hamsters still expressed species-typical behavior without a brain structure called a neocortex, they lost much of their species-typical play and maternal behaviors when deprived of brain structures called midline limbic convolutions. Likewise, if squirrel monkeys lose the medial segment of a brain structure called the globus pallidus, their ability to engage in certain sexual behavior (e.g. thigh-spreading, groin-thrusting) is either eliminated or impaired.

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