Exploring social behaviour using Tinbergen’s 4 Questions

Social behaviour—how and why animals interact with conspecifics—varies immensely across the Tree of Life. Group formation, colonial behaviour, mating behaviour and parenting are among the most complex and fascinating forms of social behaviour. To uncover the causes and implications of behaviour, ethologists often adopt Tinbergen’s 4-pronged approach to embrace ontological, phylogenetic, neuro-genomic and ecological investigations of behaviour. Using breeding strategies of sexually reproducing animals as main focus, here I overview some of my research group’s achievements over the past 35 years. Beyond specific findings, our research led to two major conclusions. First, specialisation into certain research approaches and methodologies is a necessity in science, however, novel insights can often be gained by moving out of the comfort-zone of a particular research field and using the toolkit of a different discipline to answer a salient question. Second, whilst pursuing a particular research question, it is worth keeping an eye on seemingly counterintuitive—or even insignificant—results since these can be the source of unconventional follow-up research potentially leading to discoveries. Taken together, studies of social behaviour will continue to provide a rich source for discoveries in ethology of animals including humans.