Oskar Heinroth was a German

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

 biologist

Biology

Biology is a natural science concerned with the study of life and living organisms, including their structure, function, growth, origin, evolution, distribution, and taxonomy. Biology is a vast subject containing many subdivisions, topics, and disciplines...

 who was one of the first to apply the methods of comparative morphology

Morphology (biology)

In biology, morphology is a branch of bioscience dealing with the study of the form and structure of organisms and their specific structural features....

 to animal behaviour, and was thus one of the founders of ethology

Ethology

Ethology is the scientific study of animal behavior, and a sub-topic of zoology....

. His extensive studies of behaviour in the Anatidae

Anatidae

Anatidae is the biological family of birds that includes ducks, geese and swans. The family has a cosmopolitan distribution, occurring on all the world's continents except Antarctica and on most of the world's islands and island groups...

 (ducks and geese) showed that instinct

Instinct

Instinct or innate behavior is the inherent inclination of a living organism toward a particular behavior.The simplest example of an instinctive behavior is a fixed action pattern, in which a very short to medium length sequence of actions, without variation, are carried out in response to a...

ive behaviour patterns correlated with taxonomic

Taxonomy

Taxonomy is the science of identifying and naming species, and arranging them into a classification. The field of taxonomy, sometimes referred to as "biological taxonomy", revolves around the description and use of taxonomic units, known as taxa...

 relationships determined on the basis of morphological features. He also rediscovered the phenomenon of imprinting

Imprinting (psychology)

Imprinting is the term used in psychology and ethology to describe any kind of phase-sensitive learning that is rapid and apparently independent of the consequences of behavior...

, reported in the 19th century by Douglas Spalding

Douglas Spalding

Douglas Alexander Spalding was an English biologist. He was born in Islington in London in 1841, and began life as a manual labourer. Subsequently he lived in Scotland, near Aberdeen; the philosopher Alexander Bain persuaded the University of Aberdeen to allow him to attend courses without charge....

 but not followed up at the time. His results were popularised by Konrad Lorenz

Konrad Lorenz

Konrad Zacharias Lorenz was an Austrian zoologist, ethologist, and ornithologist. He shared the 1973 Nobel Prize with Nikolaas Tinbergen and Karl von Frisch...

, whose mentor he was. Lorenz regarded Heinroth as the true founder of the study of animal behaviour seen as a branch of zoology.

Heinroth was born in Mainz

Mainz

Mainz under the Holy Roman Empire, and previously was a Roman fort city which commanded the west bank of the Rhine and formed part of the northernmost frontier of the Roman Empire...

-Kastel. He began his studies of duck and goose behaviour while working as a scientific assistant from 1898 to 1913. He subsequently became the director of the Berlin

Berlin

Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...

Aquarium, a post he held for more than 30 years. He died in Berlin.

External links

• Wildlife recordings made by Oskar Heinroth - streamed audio recordings from the British Library