Question: which animals have you studied?

Edward Codling answered on 15 Jun 2011:

Hi gyalzz 🙂

A lot of my work has been looking at general rules for animal behaviour that can be applied to many different animal species. For example, some of the work I have done using computer simulations to test different animal group behaviour rules can be applied to bird flocks, fish schools, herds of deer, and even human crowds.

The real experiments I have done most recently have involved 3 types of animals: plankton (which are tiny little bugs that swim around in sea water) that we have to film through a microscope, fish – in particular coral reef fish such as clownfish (Nemos), and humans (which are animals of course!). In all three cases the experiments I have done basically involved us filming the animals (or people) under different conditions. This allows us to test what are the most important factors in their behaviour.

In some of my other studies I have looked at movement data from lots of different animal species – from insects to elephants to albatrosses (and many other types). However, in these studies I didn’t collect the data or do the experiments and have mainly followed work done by other people.

In the work I have done on fisheries I have also studied data from almost all the different types of fish that fishermen catch (so anything that you can buy in the fish shop and much more!). I didn’t collect this data myself though – it is collected by scientists all across Europe and then shared.