Question: why did you deside to study the behavoriour in animals?

Edward Codling answered on 20 Jun 2011:

Hi hursl006

Good question! I started studying animal behaviour when I did my PhD research degree. This was basically an extended research project to use maths to model different types of animal movement behaviour (for example, animals foraging and searching for food, or animals navigating along a migration route). For me this was really good as I could use the maths skills I had learnt in my earlier degree to look at a really interesting problem in ecology.

I suppose I could have used the maths skills I had in another area of biology – for example, one of my colleagues uses very similar maths as I do to study the growth of blood vessels in tumours. However, animals have always interested me and I like to learn more about them. I am certainly not an expert on animal behaviour though – I am still learning and like to work with other ecologists who can teach me more about the areas of ecology that I don’t know much about. I am learning about plankton behaviour at the moment – there are thousands of different types of plankton and all of them have different types of behaviour. At the moment we are studying copepods: http://invertebrates.si.edu/copepod/