#5/15 What is behaviour?
How does planet Earth work?
When you are exposed to environments for the first time, your brain stores a picture to recall later.
Have you ever gone down a familiar street and not remembered anything you passed along the way? That’s your brain filtering out what’s recognised and keeping you focused. If a car pulls out unexpectedly, you’ll notice!
The urge to fiddle with your environment, to keep it how your brain expects it to be, is built into your DNA. As an animal, you constantly modify the world to match what your memory has stored as ‘normal’. You organise your bedroom, tend your garden and put away the dishes every day (or maybe you don’t?) In the same way a spider constantly rebuilds a web and the lyrebird digs 350 tonnes of soil a year.
If you trip on an obstacle unexpectedly left in a doorway at home, or your supermarket decides to move the bread to a different aisle, you get stressed. Chronic stress kills animals. It’s the reason behind diseases in animals like Koalas and stems from the uncertainty of habitat loss.
Animals are in a continual effort to maintain order, to behave in a way they expect things to be, because we are made that way. This is a trait all individual animals have and it makes us powerful influencers on the world. It’s the reason why we evolved to exist.
So, how does a species of animal survive, if everything is based on the behaviour of individuals? That is one of the most beautiful questions in nature. The answer lies with ecosystems.
