• Question: What has been your favourite piece of work?

    Asked by katelyn2017 to Carrie, Cedric, Ellen, Ines, Rupert on 8 Mar 2017.
    • Photo: Ines Goncalves

      Ines Goncalves answered on 8 Mar 2017:

      I really enjoyed my phd. I was quite independent in my choice of questions and had full responsibility of my experiments. I really enjoyed answering those questions and fitting the pieces of the puzzle together. I studied mate choice and paternal care in pipefish, a family of fish that also includes seahorse. All males in this fish family take care of the embryos, and in the most extreme cases the father literally become pregnant. They’re adorable! Anyway, I looked at how good or bad parents small and large males are and how females respond when all they have available are small or large males (so good or bad fathers). Females will still mate, but they put more nutrients into the eggs when they mate with small males, which they know aren’t as good fathers. 19 females prefer to mate with large males than small males, 2) large males are better fathers than small fathers 3) when females have to mate with small males, they invest more to make up for the fathers poor care. The pieces fit together. 🙂

    • Photo: Rupert Marshall

      Rupert Marshall answered on 9 Mar 2017:

      Actually doing the work, my favourite has been sitting in a field, recording a bird singing and watching its song scroll across my laptop screen. You can see what it looks like here:

      I did an experiment when I played back some songs to some birds to see how they would react. I was amazed when they flew down to the loudspeaker and sat on it or pecked it – it proved that song is so important in their lives, defending a territory or attracting a mate

    • Photo: Ellen Williams

      Ellen Williams answered on 9 Mar 2017:

      I think I have most enjoyed the work I am doing now, my PhD. It has been the first chance that I have ever got to spend a good chunk of time just basically doing whatever I would like. I chose the title, I chose the direction and day to day I choose what to do. I like that freedom, to have a play with ideas and see what might work 🙂

    • Photo: Carrie Ijichi

      Carrie Ijichi answered on 13 Mar 2017:

      I think doing behaviour tests to assess personality in horses. We did all sorts of things to see how they react as individuals and differ from each other. We asked them to walk over a big blue tarpaulin (Bridge test), put a big inflatable crocodile and kids parachute on the floor to see if they would go near it (novel object test) and opened an umbrella near them to see how big their reaction was (reactivity test). Lots of fun and so many different responses to the tests.

    • Photo: Cedric Tan

      Cedric Tan answered on 13 Mar 2017:

      Oooo! There’s so many depending on what in at the moment. As for my PhD research it would be the interesting behaviour exhibited by chickens:

      And recently, it would be my work on clouded leopards in Malaysia:

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