Question: is it good studying animals?

Edward Codling answered on 15 Jun 2011:

Hi lowne001 – thanks for the question! 🙂

I really enjoy studying animal behaviour as I want to try and understand why they behave in the way that they do. I have lots of pets at home and am always wondering why they do certain things – by studying animal behaviour I can sometimes get answers to these questions.

The other reason why studying animal behaviour is important is so that we can manage and protect wildlife populations better. For example if we want to close off an area as a reserve and protect the animals inside then we need to know how far and how often they move. Some of the studies that I am doing on movement behaviour will help us understand this better and hence hopefully manage and conserve wildlife better as well.

Sometimes though animals don’t behave as you expect them to. One of the experiments we wanted to do was to test how certain animals behaved in a group under different conditions. However, we couldn’t get any of the animals we had to do what we wanted so we ended up doing some experiments with humans instead – people were much easier to control and give instructions to!

Do you find animals and their behaviour interesting?