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Migration

Migration

Migration is long-range, seasonal movement from one region or habitat to another. This common strategy, carried out by many different organisms around the world, is an adaptive response that typically corresponds to changes in an organism’s environment, like resource availability or climate. Migrations can involve huge groups of thousands of animals as well as single individuals traveling alone and can range from thousands of kilometers to just a few hundred meters.

Introduction to Learning

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Imprinting

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Avoidance Learning and Learned Helplessness

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Avoidance learning occurs when an organism learns that a specific behavior can prevent an unpleasant outcome. For example, a student who receives a bad grade may start studying harder to avoid future poor grades. This behavior persists even when the negative outcome is no longer present. Avoidance learning is powerful because it maintains behavior in the absence of the...

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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Jul 1, 2025

Using Pharmacological Manipulation and High-precision Radio Telemetry to Study the Spatial Cognition in Free-ranging Animals

Using Pharmacological Manipulation and High-precision Radio Telemetry to Study the Spatial Cognition in Free-ranging Animals

Published on: November 6, 2016

Learning shapes the development of migratory behavior.

Ellen O Aikens^1,2,3,4, Elham Nourani^5,6, Wolfgang Fiedler^5,6

¹School of Computing, University of Wyoming, Laramie, WY 82071.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America

|March 4, 2024

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

Young white storks explore new routes during migration to gain information while saving energy. As they mature, they adopt faster, more direct flights, demonstrating learned refinement of migratory behavior over their lifetime.

Keywords:

energetics fidelity ontogeny of migration routes timing

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Area of Science:

Ornithology
Animal Behavior
Ecology

Background:

Understanding how migratory behaviors develop over an animal's life (ontogeny of migration) is crucial for predicting species' adaptability to environmental changes.
Limited ability to track individuals from birth has hindered research into the ontogeny of migration.

Purpose of the Study:

To test the exploration-refinement hypothesis on the ontogeny of migration in white storks (Ciconia ciconia).
To investigate how young birds balance energy, time, and information acquisition during migration.
To understand how migratory strategies change with age and experience.

Main Methods:

Tracking the migratory movements of young white storks over their first few years of life.
Analyzing flight paths, energy expenditure, and exploration patterns.
Comparing migratory behavior between younger and older individuals.

Main Results:

Young birds exhibited reduced energy expenditure and increased exploration of new areas during migration.
Older, more experienced birds undertook faster, more direct migratory flights, increasing energy expenditure.
White storks developed novel migratory shortcuts, indicating reliance on learned spatial memory.

Conclusions:

Individual learning plays a significant role in refining long-distance migratory behavior within an animal's lifetime.
The study supports the exploration-refinement hypothesis, showing a shift from exploration to efficiency with age.
Ontogeny of migration involves incremental behavioral adjustments based on experience and learning.