Although scientists observe that an organism’s behavior falls into rhythmic
patterns, they disagree about how these patterns are affected when the organism
is transported to a new environment. One experimenter, Brown, brought oysters
from Connecticut waters to Illinois waters. She noted that the oysters
initially opened their shells widest when it was high tide in Connecticut, but
that after fourteen days their rhythms had adapted to the tide schedule in
Illinois. Although she could not posit an unequivocal causal relationship between
behavior and environmental change, Brown concluded that a change in tide
schedule is one of several possible exogenous influences (those outside the
organism) on the oysters’ rhythms. Another experimenter, Hamner, however,
discovered that hamsters from California maintain their original rhythms even
at the South Pole. He concluded that endogenous influences (those inside the
organism) seem to affect an organism’s rhythmic behavior.
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