Is ethology a neglected field within the scientific community in Türkiye?

Year 2025, Volume: 26 Issue: 2, 103 - 105, 15.10.2025

Volkan Aksoy

Abstract

The term “ethology,” the scientific study of animal behavior, was coined by the French zoologist Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire in the nineteenth century, based on ethos meaning “character” and logia meaning “the study of,” both from the Greek (Jaynes, 1969). The popularization of the term was propagated by the American myrmecologist Wheeler in 1902 (see Sleigh, 2007). The European
school of ethology found its roots, in addition to other contributors, largely with Nikolaas Tinbergen (1907–1988), Konrad Lorenz (1903–1989), and Karl von Frisch (1886–1982), who was awarded
the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1973. This event was a milestone for other later researchers who were greatly motivated by it, and data on different aspects of animal behavior on a wide variety of taxa started to accumulate with their studies. Readers are kindly asked to follow Fericean et al. (2015) for a plain and clear history of ethology in general and Taborsky (2010) for ethology in Europe in particular.

Keywords

ethology , behaviour , scientific development