beckybooI’m a Scientist is like school science lessons meet the X Factor! School students choose which scientist gets a prize of $1000 to communicate their work.
Scientists and students talk on this website. They both break down barriers, have fun and learn. But only the students get to vote.
This zone is the Disease Zone. It has scientists studying theĀ causes and processes ofĀ illness . Who gets the prize? YOU decide!
Beckyboo;Sorry, I don’t have any experience in behavioural ecology. I used rabbit to raise antibody for my enzyme in immunology experiment, though.
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In theory, behavioural ecologists are interested in every sort of animal, from the large to the tiny, from sponges in the sea to humans (yup, we’re animals!). Insects, fish, birds, monkeys, they’re all on the table, and some behavioural ecologists even study life forms that aren’t animals. For example, I know of people who study the behaviour of slime moulds, which are ‘protists’ (for fun, look up the dog vomit slime mold – it’s a thing! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slime_mold).
Generally, as behavioural ecologists we study the evolution of behaviour, so we’ll study any form of life that shows behaviour. With that said, some animals are much more commonly studied than others. I just came back from a big conference of behavioural ecologists, and some of the most common species were the Great Tit (stop laughing, it’s a bird: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Tit), fish like cichlids and cleaner wrasses (a ‘cleaner’ fish that eats the parasites off of other ‘client’ fish), sheep and goats, squirrels, and some of the primates like baboons. A bird that you might have seen here in Australia, the zebra finch, is a bird that my Ph.D. lab studied, and insects are also very common in behavioural ecology because they’re fairly easy to study in the lab and there’s a lot of them.
If you’re into animal behaviour, then the sky is the limit: if it shows behaviour, you can study it!
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Steven has answered this really well, I just wanted to add that when we did behavioural ecology in university, we spent a lot of time looking at different types of birds. Next time you see some birds hopping about on the grass, watch them for a little while, and notice how they act, either alone, with other birds, or with animals. Magpies act very different to sparrows or cockatoos.
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Well, I’ve have worked with mice and looked at their behaviour (they’re funny little critters). For example, I did my PhD in a laboratory where we studied Alzheimer’s disease. We had some mice that had Alzheimer’s disease and looked at how good they were at remembering where to find things (like food or shelter). Just like humans with Alzheimer’s disease (dementia), we found that the mice are forgetfull and have really bad short term memory problems. We can then treat them with new drugs (I used green tea and omega-3 fatty acids), to see if that would improve their memory.
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Hi Beckyboo. I have no experience at all with behavioural ecology – but thanks for asking the question, because I’ve learned something today with Steven’s awesome answer š
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