Theodore Christian Schneirla (July 23, 1902,
Bay City, Michigan
Bay City is a city in Bay County, Michigan, United States, and its county seat. The population was 32,661 at the 2020 United States census, 2020 census. The city is located just upriver from the Saginaw Bay on the Saginaw River. It is the princip ...
— Aug. 20, 1968,
New York, N.Y.) was an American animal psychologist who performed some of the first studies on the behavior patterns of
army ant
The name army ant (or legionary ant or ''marabunta'') is applied to over 200 ant species in different lineages. Because of their aggressive predatory foraging groups, known as "raids", a huge number of ants forage simultaneously over a limited ...
s.
Schneirla was educated at the
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
The University of Michigan (U-M, U of M, or Michigan) is a public research university in Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States. Founded in 1817, it is the oldest institution of higher education in the state. The University of Michigan is one of th ...
(M.S., 1925; Sc.D., 1928), and joined the staff of
New York University
New York University (NYU) is a private university, private research university in New York City, New York, United States. Chartered in 1831 by the New York State Legislature, NYU was founded in 1832 by Albert Gallatin as a Nondenominational ...
in 1928. He made the first of eight trips to the
Barro Colorado Island
Barro Colorado Island is located in the man-made Gatun Lake in the middle of the Panama Canal. The island was formed when the waters of the Chagres River were dammed to form the lake in 1913. When the waters rose, they covered a significant part ...
,
Panama Canal Zone
The Panama Canal Zone (), also known as just the Canal Zone, was a International zone#Concessions, concession of the United States located in the Isthmus of Panama that existed from 1903 to 1979. It consisted of the Panama Canal and an area gene ...
, to study the behavior of army ants in 1932. His "Studies on Army Ants in Panama," published the next year, provided new insight into their behavior. He discovered that these ants operate on a 36-day cycle consisting of a 16-day nomadic pattern followed by a 20-day stationary phase. In 1934 he reported that ants follow a particular pattern when moving into new territory and that raids by these insects peak once during the morning and again in the afternoon. Sudden changes in weather also were found to give rise to sudden bursts of activity. In 1944 he showed that their raids were caused by the level of excitability of the ant colony and not by a scarcity of prey.
In 1943 Schneirla became associate curator of the Department of Animal Behavior at the
American Museum of Natural History
The American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) is a natural history museum on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City. Located in Theodore Roosevelt Park, across the street from Central Park, the museum complex comprises 21 interconn ...
, New York City. After his return from a study of army ants in southern Mexico, he became the full curator of the museum in 1947.
Schneirla was the author of a large number of scientific papers and the coauthor of several books on psychology, including ''Principles of Animal Psychology'' (with N.R.F. Maier; 1935) and ''Recent Experiments in Psychology'' (with L.W. Crafts; 1938). The concept of integrative levels permeated almost all of his papers. Six of his publications are directly devoted to the application of the concept of integrative levels to comparative psychology and social organization. Schneirla has been noted for his effectiveness in combining the concept of integrative levels with behavioral ontogeny to create a comprehensive theory of how organisms develop during their individual lives and how development changes across evolution. This theory provided a picture of more and more complex developmental processes as we go from lower to higher animal species.
Books
* Maier, N. R. F., Théodore Christian Schneirla, T. C., (1935) "Principles of animal psychology". McGraw-Hill Book Company
* Aronson, L. R., Tobach, E., Rosenblatt, J. S., Lehrman, D. S. (Eds.) (1972) "Selected writings of T. C. Schneirla". Oxford, England: W.H. Freeman & Co.
References
*
* Greenberg, Gary and Tobach, Ethel, "Behavioral Evolution and Integrative Levels. The T.C. Schneirla Conference Series", Lawrence Earlbaum Associates, Inc. Publisher, 1984. p. 70.
External links
Development and evolution of behavior; essays in memory of T.C. Schneirla(1970)
{{DEFAULTSORT:Schneirla, T. C.
People associated with the American Museum of Natural History
1902 births
1968 deaths
20th-century American zoologists
University of Michigan alumni