• Question: do you study ethology, comparative psychology, behavioral ecology, or anthropology.

    Asked by jenniferno to Edd on 17 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Edward Codling

      Edward Codling answered on 17 Jun 2011:

      Wow – great question jenniferno! 🙂

      The work that I do doesn’t really fit neatly into any of these classifications, although ‘behavioural ecology’ is probably the most appropriate. Some of the work I do with young fish could be classed as ethology (there is some behavioural imprinting involved – we get them to follow chemical signals for food), while the work we have done on human crowd behaviour has been done together with some human psychologists. Probably the least appropriate classificaiton for my work would be anthropology as this tends to be the study of human societies over time. I have only looked at human behaviour in a very specific context – how crowds behave and we have tried to relate this to general rules for animal group behaviour.

      Some of the questions that I look at in behavioural ecology can also sometimes be partly answered by using maths and computer simulations. For example one question we asked ourselves is – what would happen if an animal group was trying to find home (e.g. a roost) but there were no leaders in the group who knew where to go? We actually first looked at this problem using a simulation where we tried lots of different behavioural rules to see which would work best. A simulation is ideal for this as it wouldn’t be possible to try out all these possible behaviours with real animals. We then wanted to test the behaviour that we predicted would be best with real animal groups – but fish and birds are very difficult to control which is why we used humans!

      There is some more info about the sort of research I do on my website:
      http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~ecodling/EACresearch.htm

      I would defnitely describe myself as an ‘inter-disciplinary’ scientist – I work in lots of areas of science! However, I am not really an expert in all these areas – I am still learning a lot about ecology and animal behaviour for example. I enjoy learning new things and exploring new areas of science I haven’t studied before!

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