Abstract
In the second article in the series, I will describe how the young Karl von Frisch, later to become another founding father of ethology and Nobel Laureate, defied established authority to design simple yet logically clever experiments to show that honey bees indeed have colour vision. His experiments forever changed our view of animals and also the way experiments in animal behaviour are designed. It might interest readers to know that Karl von Frisch’s experiments described in this part inspired Tinbergen’s experiments described in the previous article in this series.
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Suggested Reading
Karl von Frisch, Bees: Their Vision, Chemical Senses and Language, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, USA and London, 1971, 1950.
B Hölldobler and M Lindauer, Experimental Behavioural Ecology and Sociobiology–in Memoriam Karl von Frisch, Gustav Fischer Verlag, Stuttgart, New York, 1985.
Lars Chittka, The Mind of The Bee, Princeton University Press, 2019 (in press).
Lars Chittka, Does Bee Color Vision Predate the Evolution of Flower Color? Naturwissenschaften, Vol.83, pp.136–138, 1996.
A D Briscoe and L Chittka, The Evolution of Color Vision in Insects, Ann. Rev. Entomol., Vol.46, pp.471–510, 2001.
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Raghavendra Gadagkar is Year of Science Chair Professor at the Centre for Ecological Sciences, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, Honorary Professor at JNCASR, and Non-Resident Permanent Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg (Institute for Advanced Study), Berlin. During the past 35 years he has established an active school of research in the area of animal behaviour, ecology and evolution. The origin and evolution of cooperation in animals, especially in social insects, such as ants, bees and wasps, is a major goal of his research.
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Gadagkar, R. How to Design Experiments in Animal Behaviour. Reson 23, 1101–1116 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12045-018-0716-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12045-018-0716-x