avoidance behaviour

Type of activity, exhibited by animals exposed to adverse stimuli, in which the tendency to flee or to act defensively is stronger than the tendency to attack.

Vision is the sense that most often produces avoidance behaviour (e.g., small birds react to the sight of an owl), but sound (e.g., a warning cry) may do so as well.

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▪ psychology

Introduction

      type of activity seen in animals exposed to adverse stimuli, in which the tendency to act defensively is stronger than the tendency to attack. The underlying implication that a single neural mechanism is involved (such as a specific part of the brain, which, under electrical stimulation, seems to inflict punishment) remains only a hypothesis. Clearly, the same kinds of avoidance behaviour might result from different underlying physiological mechanisms. Thus, although the various dichotomies, or polarities, of behaviour such as positive and negative, psychoanalytic life and death instincts, and approach and withdrawal concepts may be logical or philosophical conveniences, they seem, nevertheless, to lack clear meaning physiologically.

      Alternative usage defines avoidance behaviour by describing a number of patterns: active avoidance (fleeing), passive avoidance (freezing stock-still or hiding), and a pattern of protective reflexes, as seen in the startle response. There is good reason to suppose that, in cats (feline), for example, each of these patterns is coordinated separately by the brain. One kind of fleeing, in which the cat moves continuously and shows much upward climbing, is produced by electrical stimulation of specific parts of the brain (hypothalamic sites). Stimulation of other sites (in the thalamus) generates other types of fleeing movements, causing the animal to crouch, look around, move, slink close to the floor, and hide, if possible. In general, among birds and mammals, brain sites for fleeing of the first type occur in hypothalamic and mesencephalic zones.

      Protective reflexes (reflex) in mammals include ear (ear, human) retraction to a position of safety—pressed against and somewhat behind the skull—as when a horse is seen to lay its ears back. Among the monkey-like bush babies (Galagos (bush baby)) the outer ear folds up laterally and longitudinally at the same time, under threat. The eyes are closed, and the muscles around the eye are contracted, adding to the protection. During this so-called startle reflex (startle reaction), breathing is checked, and the mouth corners are pulled back to expose the teeth; this prepares both for biting in defense and also for movements of the tongue and for head shaking to free the mouth of any dangerous or distasteful substance that may have been taken in. In most mammals, the limbs flex as if ready for a leap; in the human (human behaviour) startle reflex, the arms are thrust outward as if ready to grasp at a support.

      It is helpful to consider avoidance behaviour in terms of factors that elicit it (e.g., specific stimuli) and regulate it (e.g., hormones).

Factors in avoidance behaviour

Specific stimuli

      Warning calls and visual signals that are unique to different species of birds and mammals effectively and specifically evoke avoidance patterns. In some cases, learning clearly emerges as a factor; thus, members of a colony of birds seem to learn to respond to the alarm (alarm signal) calls of all species present in the colony. Among ducklings (duck), a visual model to evoke fleeing and hiding can be fashioned as a cardboard cutout. When moved overhead in one direction, the model resembles a short-necked, long-tailed hawk, and the ducklings flee from it; when moved in the other direction, the model looks like a harmless, long-necked goose, and the ducklings tend to stay calm. The model is effective, however, in eliciting the two kinds of behaviour only when the ducklings are accustomed to geese flying over but not hawks.

      Innate factors also contribute to such responses (see instinct). Domestic chicks, for example, show crouching and freezing in response to the long alarm call of their species. Many of the perching birds (passerines (passeriform)) will gather to mob when stimulated by the sight of an owl. The eyes in the characteristic owl face have been found to be especially important; even birds reared in isolation respond to man-made models with appropriate eyespots painted on. It has been suggested that many human beings are specifically (and perhaps instinctively) disturbed (phobia) by the sight of snakes—the notion of a legless object perhaps being a key stimulus. Human responses to spiders and centipedes with conspicuous legs also may be intense. In the reaction to snakes at least, notwithstanding Freudian explanations that they symbolize male sex organs, the behaviour of people may be compared with owl mobbing among passerine birds.

      Specific chemical signals can induce avoidance behaviour; some are released by minnows and tadpoles when their skin is damaged (usually indicating to fellows that there is danger). These chemicals appear to be specific for each species of fish and are highly effective in producing fleeing (see chemoreception). Many ants (ant) produce volatile alarm substances (terpenes) that are attractants to other ants at low concentrations and, in high concentrations near their source, produce rapid locomotion, defense postures, and, sometimes, fleeing. Some invertebrate avoidance responses are reflexes evoked by very specific stimuli; rapid swimming by cockles clapping their shells, for example, is elicited by starfish extract. Shell jerking is produced in a freshwater snail (Physa) by contact with a leech, another specific response to a major predator.

Pain, startle, and novelty

      Painful stimuli are preeminent among those that produce avoidance. Among mammals (including man) many such responses are patently inborn, as is the reflex withdrawal of one's finger from a hot griddle.

      To classify a stimulus as startling or novel requires some comparison with previous stimulation. Human responses (orientation reflex) to startling or interesting stimuli may be studied by presenting a series of repeated tones; the orientation reflex tends to appear at the moment at which some change in the usual sequence (such as a longer or shorter tone) occurs. There is some evidence that the hippocampus (a brain structure) is involved in the human experience of novelty. Surgical removal of the hippocampus in many animals makes avoidance responses to strange objects far more persistent; a comparable operation in small parrots (lovebirds) greatly increases the persistence of calls that gather others for mobbing. Probably the hippocampus takes part in establishing memory of any new stimulus, and once this has occurred, the stimulus is no longer novel. Removal of other brain structures (the amygdala) reduces avoidance of strange objects (e.g., in lovebirds) and also makes fleeing and defensive attack less likely.

Passive and active avoidance

      Passive avoidance is achieved by the inhibition of a previously exhibited response. Thus, after a laboratory animal has learned to approach a food dish, it may then be punished by an electric shock whenever a selected visual or auditory stimulus is present. In passive avoidance, the animal may freeze as soon as the stimulus is given; in active avoidance, the animal is given the opportunity of fleeing.

      Freezing proper entails general motor inhibition, which, if sustained, may pass into signs of reduced arousal. States of considerable loss of muscle tonus, of eye closure, and many signs of deep sleep have been variously termed feigning death or animal hypnosis. In very young fowl, such signs can be induced simply by holding the animal firmly if the experience is novel (and thus presumably frightening). Such states tend to occur as an alternative to fleeing when the apparently frightening stimulus is difficult to locate or to escape. Among social mammals (e.g., cats or dogs) the status and confidence of an animal may be inferred from its degree of leg extension, arched back (vertebral tonus), and cocky tail elevation. Threat from which there seems no escape may induce a progressive approach to immobility and to general motor inhibition.

Punishment

      Inhibitory interconnections have been postulated between the punishment and reward systems within the brain. One line of evidence suggesting a single punishment system rather than a number of them includes behavioral and neurological resemblances in the responses of animals to fear-inducing and to frustrating circumstances. If either fear (emotion) or frustration is induced during conditioning, both produce resistance to extinction. Both are specifically opposed by barbiturate drugs.

      Whatever its physiological basis, negative reinforcement (punishment) can induce in an animal both the inhibition of the response that produced the punishment and the avoidance of the location at which it occurred. Sometimes the tendency to show avoidance behaviour develops further with time, even without additional training. Thus, when being conditioned (conditioning) to discriminate between stimuli (e.g., two tones), some breeds of dog (e.g., Alsatians), if made to wait for food reward or given an impossible discrimination to perform, will howl and show great excitement. On later days, they may first resist mounting the conditioning stand and finally resist approaching the room to which earlier they ran eagerly, presumably for the rewards of food. Stimuli associated with the training room are sometimes said to act as secondary negative reinforcers (secondary punishments) in such a case.

      Even a piece of cockroach nervous system (metathoracic ganglion) and the leg it controls have been shown to be capable of avoidance conditioning. If each contact of the leg with a water surface is paired with an electric shock, the leg comes to be retracted on contact with the water; no such change occurs in a control leg receiving the same number of shocks at random. The conditioning is accompanied by a very marked decrease in a chemical (acetylcholinesterase) found in the nervous system; since it greatly facilitates transmission of some nerve impulses, such a chemical may well be basic to this primitive kind of learning (animal learning).

Hormonal effects

      Male hormones (hormone) (androgens) cause the performance of new mobbing calls in the breeding season by many male passerine birds (e.g., chaffinch) and also some other birds (e.g., farmyard cock); it is not certain whether the effect is specific to the vocalization or whether the hormone produces a general change in responsiveness to frightening stimuli. Female hamsters (hamster) are initially faster than males to emerge from a box and also move about more in a strange place; perhaps females innately tend to be less nervous. Females behave more like male hamsters if given a small injection of male hormone (testosterone) in the second day of life; the adult difference survives castration, so it probably rests on sexual differentiation of the nervous system rather than on adult hormone levels.

      The adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH) from the pituitary glands of many animals may facilitate avoidance behaviour. ACTH has other direct effects on the nervous system (e.g., facilitating male sexual behaviour).

Functions of avoidance behaviour

Fleeing and escape

      Most animals capable of locomotion show a rapid locomotor reflex to painful or startling stimuli. Such a reflex is very ancient in an evolutionary sense; it is present even in such primitive marine animals as the slender, tiny, translucent amphioxus. The rapid propulsion of an octopus or squid by its own jet of water or of a crayfish by a blow of its tail, the sudden leap and flight of a grasshopper, and the retraction of a worm into its hole—all are examples of such avoidance behaviour.

      Many invertebrates commonly compete in speed against their vertebrate predators, which tend to have faster conducting individual nerve cells; in order to compete successfully, the invertebrates seem to have evolved giant nerves (nervous system) (bundle of individual cell fibres), for the broader a nerve is, the faster it conducts. Among such lower animals, perhaps one-third or more of the nerve cord running the length of the body is made up of fibres responsible for initiating the escape response of the species. The fibres of a cockroach, for example, activate a mechanism that produces rapid running when the rear end (anal cerci) is disturbed by air movements. Bony fishes also have such structures, the Mauthner cells, that initiate escape swimming when stimulated.

      Escape may be facilitated not only by speed of response but also by its explosive onset (e.g., after a period of shamming death), making it difficult for a predator to predict the behaviour of a prospective meal. Escape movements may stop as suddenly as they start. Many animals may even be especially conspicuous in escape (e.g., showing coloured hind wings, as do some grasshoppers and moths), so that their disappearance (aposematic mechanism) appears even more sudden. Presumably, the predator, engaged in pursuing and tracking a moving prey, finds it difficult to shift quickly enough to a different kind of search and so is unable to localize the exact point of disappearance.

      In many instances, rapid locomotion is enough to frustrate a predator; in others, direction is crucial (e.g., a fish moving upward to the water surface or downward to the bottom or, among birds, a more elaborate celestial orientation). Under threat, insects such as pond skaters (Vellia) flee toward the nearest shore; beach fleas (amphipods) flee to the sea; and particular populations of ducks have a preferred compass direction for escape (so-called nonsense orientation).

Freezing

      Immobility usually makes detection less likely. For stick insects (walkingstick) and other animals resembling twigs or leaves, when immobility itself becomes conspicuous against moving foliage, the animals' compensatory swaying increases the camouflage effect. There seems to be an evolutionary conflict between camouflage and the need for conspicuous signals in communication. Social groups commonly keep in touch by calls or by movements such as tail flicks, which are inhibited during freezing or even under incipient immobility. Movements may be made conspicuous by patches of white or colour on a bird's outer tail feathers or under a mammal's tail. The well-known white rear patch of hair among antelopes, for example, is hidden when the tail is folded or lowered under conditions of safety.

Protection reflexes, armour, and spines

      Facial protective reflexes are usually well developed in flat-faced mammalian predators like cats and tarsiers, whose eyes and ears are especially exposed to injury by prey. The reflexes also are exaggerated in social species for use in communication; thus ear flattening in horse and dog displays has a counterpart in scalp retraction among Old World monkeys. The scalp movements and raised brows are effectively used in communication, despite the greatly reduced mobility of ears among monkeys. Limbs and other appendages (e.g., antennae) are withdrawn or used to protect sensitive areas by both vertebrates and invertebrates. Among mollusks (mollusk) and such groups as sea squirts and barnacles, the whole soft body can be retracted into a protective shell, or carapace; a kind of door (operculum) may be used to stop the entrance (e.g., among snails and barnacles), and trap-door spiders pull the stopper in place behind them. Bone may have evolved (evolution) in fossil vertebrates as protective armour in jawless ancient fishes (ostracoderms), probably as a result of natural selection in the face of dominant arthropod predators (eurypterids). With the evolution of jaws, the vertebrates themselves gave rise to nearly all later large predators. Evolutionary advantage then apparently came with complex sense organs and behaviour; in most vertebrate lines there is evidence of a progressive reduction in body armour (dermal bone). Thus, although such cartilaginous fishes as sharks and rays do not exhibit such bony skins, they may well have evolved from heavily armoured ancient fishes (placoderms).

      Armour nevertheless has evolved repeatedly, particularly among animals incapable of fast locomotion; trunkfish (boxfish), for example, have a body entirely boxed by bony plates; and tortoises (tortoise) and turtles (turtle) are perhaps the most completely armoured of four-legged animals. The turtles seem to have evolved early from the basal stock of the reptiles; thanks to the shell (carapace) within which they can withdraw head, limbs, and tail, they represent one of the few reptilian orders that have remained consistently successful. The turtle's dorsal carapace appears to consist of newly evolved plates of dermal bones, but the belly plates (ventral plastron) may well be retained in part from fish ancestors. Reptilian land vegetarians usually tended to evolve armour, as in the fossil dinosaurs such as stegosaurs and ankylosaurs.

      South American toothless animals (edentates) such as anteaters are probably survivors of a comparable early development in mammals. The armour of armadillos (armadillo) and the presence of bony plates in the skin of the extinct sloths suggest that the whole group may derive from an armoured ancestor. The appearance of hair in the mammal line seems to have led to the evolution of a light, spiny type of armour. Such modern mammals as hedgehogs, echidnas, insect-eating tenrecs, and some rodents and their relatives (lagomorphs) all possess defensive spines that are commonly erectile and are often able to roll into a ball like an armadillo.

      Chemical means of defense may be widely distributed in the body, making the animal distasteful to predators. Some of these chemical compounds may be derived from plants eaten or synthesized by the animal itself (e.g., bufotoxin in toads). Although the animal attacked may be killed and thus not benefit, his fellows do since they are likely to be avoided by the predator. poison or distasteful substances may also be ejected from a bodily reservoir and squirted at the enemy (e.g., the skunk, some ants) or inserted into a puncture made by a spine (e.g., triggerfish) or teeth (e.g., certain snakes). Many poisons act to paralyze muscles by blocking nerve transmission at the neuromuscular junction (e.g., cobra venom).

Warning behaviour

      Mobbing behaviour apparently advertises the presence of a predator that is potentially but not immediately dangerous; thus mammalian nest predators can be safely mobbed by flying birds, as can owls in the daytime. From the safety of trees, monkeys and squirrels mob predators on the ground. Mobbing calls are typically easy to locate, the calls being short and staccato, and they provide excellent cues of distance and direction. Conspicuous movements, such as tail flicks among small birds and squirrels, accompany the calls.

      More urgently, intense warning behaviour is given in response to sources of immediate danger. Warning calls are usually long whistles that make location difficult because of their gradual onset and termination and their narrow ranges of pitch. The evolution of warning behaviour that puts the displaying animal in danger (such as these intense warning calls) seems likely to come about only if the benefit to offspring and other members of the species is great. Indeed, it has been calculated that, if an individual loses his life as the result of his warning behaviour, increased transmission of his family's genes will result only if the reproductive rate of relatives (as close as sisters) is doubled as a result of his sacrifice.

Richard J. Andrew

Additional Reading

Sebastian P. Grossman, A Textbook of Physiological Psychology (1967), contains valuable material on several aspects of avoidance behaviour. David L. Evans and Justin O. Schmidt (eds.), Insect Defenses: Adaptive Mechanisms and Strategies of Prey and Predators (1990), focuses on behaviours involving avoidance, escape, and counterattack in terrestrial arthropods.

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