Don't worry, this post isn't going to be a deep philosophical discussion about what the meaning of life is (42) and how do we find meaning. There are some questions even I don't dive into.
No, I'm a zoologist and what I'd like to do is introduce you to the things that I study in a bit more detail. I'm going to start off with behaviour and personality because I find those to be some of the more fascinating areas and it's also something that you might not realise is a really important area of research. When we talk about personality in people we say someone is introverted, extroverted, grumpy, bubbly, charming etc.
When it comes to animals we tend to do something similar. I'm sure you've heard someone say their dog is friendly or lazy. We basically assign individuals a description based on our experience of their regular behaviours. If you think about it, our personalities play a huge part in our lives. We develop our personalities throughout our lives based on our experiences and the influences our environment has on the behaviours we express. Then in turn, our personality influences how we process information and make decisions.
Animals are exactly the same and it's important for us to understand how this works in animals because it can help us to care for them more effectively in captivity. Behaviour research has been going on for decades, one of the first to look at it was Konrad Lorenz, who is one of the first recognised animal behaviour researchers. He did research in the 1930s into the development of behaviour in young greylag geese using a natural behaviour of birds called imprinting. This happens when recently hatched chicks focus on or 'imprint' an individual as their primary carer and from then on recognise that individual as their parent/teacher.
One of Lorenz's colleagues, Nikolaas Tinbergen, who also worked to understand the behaviour of animals created a research practice known as 'Tinbergen's four questions' which give researchers in personality and behaviour a foothold of what questions you need to be asking yourself when designing experiments. These questions basically break down to;
Function : Why does the animal use this behaviour?
Evolution : How did this behaviour develop in the species?
Mechanism : What is the trigger for the behaviour/causes it to happen?
Development : How did this individual animal learn this behaviour?
These questions give us a framework for both looking at behaviours both in a species level and an individual level. Our understanding of behaviour has come a long way since Lorenz and Tinbergen began questioning the behaviour of animals.
In today's world, behaviour is used as a key method of understanding the welfare of animals that are kept in captivity. We monitor the behaviour of animals to look for anything out of the ordinary that might indicate an animal needs changes to their care. In particular, we look for abnormal repetitive behaviours (ARBs) which are also known as stereotypies (e.g. a tiger pacing back and forth). These are behaviours that seem to serve no purpose and don't seem to provide any benefit to the animal.
There are many theories as to why these behaviours are displayed, from the difference in size between their natural habitat and of their enclosure, to neurological issues caused by previous injuries or trauma. Whatever the cause, ARBs are not something that can be ignored, and zoos or anyone who works with animals use enrichment techniques to try and reduce the appearance of ARBs.
Enrichment consists of providing the animal with ways to burn off their energy and to keep mentally and physically stimulated. Enrichment can be provided in lots of different ways using toys and novel objects to engage an animal's attention, by properly designing their enclosure to have plenty of areas where they can hide, bask, swim, sleep etc. Of course the most stimulating enrichment type is the same thing that motivates us. Food. Food enrichment is usually used by providing the animals with puzzles, or by hiding food around the enclosure to make them work for it and extend their foraging time.
For my research, I'll be investigating ARBs and some of the external factors that can influence an animal's behaviour. Specifically I'll be looking at how the number of visitors to a cheetahs enclosure and the volume of noise around them affects their behaviour. In previous research it's been shown that the number of visitors in a zoo can impact on an animal although each species reacts differently. Some species react negatively, some positively and some just don't care at all.
I'll be looking into this for the cheetahs in Fota Wildlife Park to try and gauge the influence of visitors on the behaviour of the cheetahs. All of this will be to try and improve the lives of the cheetah to help encourage them to remain healthy and continue to successfully take part in the European Endangered Species Breeding Programme (EEP). This is a programme which Fota has contributed to for a number of years across a range of species to assist in creating a captive population that can be kept safe in the event that their counterparts in the wild go extinct.
Fota has a long history of breeding cheetahs and have successfully bred over two hundred cubs since the 1980s as a part of the European breeding programme. These cubs have been moved on and spread throughout zoos and collections around the world to help ensure a safe and healthy population of cheetah survives in captivity (Fota Wildlife Park Website).
Fota have also had some incredible success with other species and have sent European Bison to Poland where they have been included in a release project, reintroducing bison to the national parks there. They have also sent a male Scimitar-Horned Oryx to Tunisia as part of a release programme where he has successfully taken control over his own herd in the wild. Oryx are one of the other species in Fota I will be working on during my PhD as I'll be examining the movements of animals in the large paddock.
The main focus of that study will be to look at how different species interact and move through the same habitat. I'll be looking at the herds of Oryx, Zebra and Giraffe and examining how they behave around each other and how that might influence their movements. I'll be examining movement ecology models which are techniques that are used for analysing movement and dispersion patterns of animals.
There are different ways these models are used in research but not many studies have been done using them on captive species. I'll be mainly looking to see if captive multi-species habitats can be used as a useful environment for testing movement models. These models are important because they are used on wild animals to help us understand where they go, what their home ranges are and how their future dispersions might be affected by the changing climate and human influences.
So as you might imagine we need these models to be accurate and they need to be really thoroughly tested. Having a new way of testing models and building bridges between the animal behaviour and movement ecology research areas are my main goals for this project . It's one of the more out there goals that I really don't have a clue where it will end up but that's all part of the fun!
The last area I'll be working on is looking into the conservation of a national Irish species but I'm going to leave that for another post where I dig into the topic of conservation a bit more and share some of my opinions.
I hope you enjoyed reading this and will come back for more. Just let me know if you have any comments or want to reach out about anything at all!
References:
Nesse, R.M. (2013), “Tinbergen’s four questions, organized: a response to Bateson and Laland”, Trends in Ecology & Evolution, Vol. 28 No. 12, pp. 681–682.
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