Ethograms

Ethograms serve as useful tools to objectively categorize the behaviors of a species. Early ethologists such as Tinbergen, Lorenz, Frisch, Whitman, Craig, and Huxley utilized ethograms to record the frequencies of instinctive behaviors that occur under specific circumstances (Matthews 2009). These provide a database of behaviors for future researchers to check and further supplement with their own data. There are two different types of ethograms: species and experimental. The species ethogram describes all known behaviors for the given species, whereas the experimental ethogram focuses only on behaviors relevant to the hypothesis being tested.