One came to mind immediately. In Walter Auffenberg’s classic work on Komodo Dragons (“The Behavioral Ecology of the Komodo Monitor”, 1981), there is a Behavioral Inventory of 73 behaviors, including such classics as “Neck-sigmoid curve” (Neck in S-shaped curve), “Roach-up” (Median dorsal skin of neck and nuchal area raised), and “Food grab” (Food object abruptly picked up in or grasped by the mouth).
The introduction to this list includes this text, quoted from elsewhere: “the literature of reptile behavior is sorely deficient in complete, objective behavior inventories. The importance of the ethogram, long known to students of animal behavior and emphasized by Tinbergen (1969) and Beer (1963), is too often neglected.”
The Tinbergen reference is from “The Study of Instinct”, Oxford Univ. Press, New York…
The Beer reference isn’t listed in the literature cited section (?, I guess because it is a reference inside a quote from another reference, and isn’t otherwise mentioned in this book).
The whole quoted reference is from Greenberg, 1977, "An ethogram of the blue spiny lizard, Sceloporus cyanogenys (Sauria, Iguanidae). J. Herpetol. 11(2):177-95.
So there are a few more places to look, though none of them particularly fresh.
@ethologist I looked at the insect crossing paper and was stunned by the scientific detail that went into the observations. The text was too small to read all of it and it’s a bit over my head, but, I’m impressed!
@dlevitis Now that is a gold mine of interesting studies to look at. I read one I could really relate to last night when I could not sleep (cat behavior using litter boxes under different circumstances): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016815911730151X
I’ve bookmarked the search results and some other articles for later reading.
@sullivanribbit Komodo dragons are such weird animals and intriguing for so many reasons. I’ll have to see if I can rundown those sources.
Thank you all for these exciting leads for browsing in this field. I’m glad I looked at that article about elephants and learned a bit as I’d never heard of ethograms before. You all are the best!
These are really eye-opening!