In Fall of 2007 I was a Teaching Assistant for an Animal Behavior course. During the first lecture, the professor told the students that “the shorthand definition of behavior is, ‘what animals do.’” After lecture, I asked her what the long hand definition was. Looking puzzled, she asked me if there was a definition in our Animal Behavior textbook. There was not. Thus started my quest for a definition of the word behavior.

I am currently working on writing a paper on that topic with Emeritus Professor WIlliam Z. Lidicker and undergraduate student Glenn Freund. We decided that we needed to know what our fellow biologists thought the word behavior meant. We created a survey on zoomerang.com and sent links to members of the Animal Behavior Society, the International Society for Applied Ethology, and the Society for Plant Neurobiology.

Full results of those surveys will be available following publication.