Pecking the red dot

A theatre project on Nico Tinbergens work, at festivals and universities around the Netherlands.

a theatrical lecture on the life and work of Niko Tinbergen – Newcastle (UK)
 
On august 6th 2013, De meeuwen van Tinbergen will return one last time with a special version of a theatrical lecture
during the international ethological conference Behaviour
2013 in Newcastle (UK). With special thanks to Brill
Publishers.

To celebrate the 65th anniversary of Behaviour and the 40th anniversary of Niko Tinbergen’s Nobel Prize, Dutch theatre company Cowboy bij Nacht and behavioral biologist Carel ten Cate will team up to deliver a special theatrical lecture about the life and work of Niko Tinbergen (1907 – 1988).
Inspired by Tinbergen’s work with herring gulls and his classic experiments on super-normal stimuli, this lecture will provide a brief account of Tinbergen’s experiments on the begging responses of Herring gull chicks, illustrated with a short movie and pictures of Tinbergen’s old notes. Tinbergen’s original data on the famous experiment on the color of the spot on the lower mandible differ
from the well-known textbook figure showing the strongest response to a red spot. Ten Cate will discuss this and show how recent data also provide a novel twist to the story of the super-normal beak. He will end with some modern examples of super-normal stimuli with humans, which is the main subject of a
long term project on Tinbergen by theater company Cowboy bij
Nacht.

De meeuwen van Tinbergen website >