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Transcript

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0:01Who are the characters behind science? This is Science Behind the Glass, Illuminating the Human Side. In this podcast, we unveil the human side of laboratories and science. Scientists share personal experiences and will discuss their meanings from different perspectives and fields of research. Welcome to Science Behind the Glass, Illuminating the Human Side, where we explore the intersection of science, human experience, and behavior. In today’s episode, we focus on the intricate world of behavior. how it drives not only animal survival, but also influences the way we as humans understand and interact with the world around us. Whether it’s unraveling the instincts of wildlife or examining the subtle motivations behind our own actions, we’ll uncover how behavior shapes both species and environment, making it a key force in adaptation and survival. We are excited to welcome to Dr. Tasman Reimer, a behavioral biologist.

1:03and lecturer at James Cook University, whose career has been devoted to studying how animals, particularly rodents, adapt to environmental stressors. Dr. Reimer holds a PhD in behavioral ecology from the University of Wheat and has conducted extensive research on animal cognition, stress responses, and resilience. Her current projects explore how individual animals, each with their own unique personalities and problem -solving abilities, cope with changing environments, offering critical insights for species conservation and reintroduction. Today we explore Dr. Reimer’s journey from studying African rodents to her groundbreaking research in Australia, revealing how behavior is key to both animal survival and our understanding of ecological balance. Dr.

1:52Reimer, welcome to the podcast. Thank you both for having me. Firstly, we have guests who work in behavioral ecology, but to dive deeply today. Could you please explain the key evolutionary milestones in animal behavior? What is that? Why is it important? So I guess animal behavior has had a very long history from people who’ve studied it extensively in the laboratory. So many people know Pavlov and some of Pavlov’s experiments on dogs and those sorts of conditioning experiments and similar. And it’s moved progressively more to people trying to understand what’s happening out in the field. But I think for me, it was back in 1963 that a very important paper was published. It was published by Nicotin Bergen, who is now known as one of the fathers of ethology, along with a couple of other people. But in this paper, he articulated ways in which we can actually study behavior. And so what he did is he emphasized that in order to understand any particular behavior, we really need to approach it from… sort of four directions or four sides so the first side is to ask the question how it arises so how does that actual behavior develop so that sort of developmental pathway that an individual might follow so from a juvenile to an adult the next question or the next set of questions sort of

3:22look at what influenced the expression of the behavior so these would be the mechanisms so these are things like genes or hormones or neurobiological factors or similar Then he also said that we need to understand the function of behavior. So how does it actually work and why does it work? So what is the necessity of it? And this comes down to thinking about behavior as having an adaptive function or as an adaptation to a particular environment. And then the last sort of angle that we can look at or side that he approached from was to ask the question how the behavior has actually evolved. So that’s looking at the evolutionary history, looking at phylogenetics and similar. And I think for me, that was a really pivotal point in the study of behavior because we had two different sort of opposing sides.

4:11We had people who focus very much on laboratory work and their sort of ideas were that behavior is driven by genes and there’s very little change. And so it’s passed down from one generation to the next and it’s sort of very fixed. And then we had people who were studying behavior in the field. So true ethologists who were trying to sort of understand why animals were doing what they were doing. And I think bringing it all together, you can look at a behavior and answer it from all four sides. And it’s still a correct answer. It’s not just this is the right one or this one is the right one. It’s the approach that we take. And so I think this integrated approach is now… It’s a place that people are trying to get to in the study of behavior, rather than just looking at one tiny focus, looking at trying to bring the four sides all together.

5:03So for me, that was, I think, a critical turning point in the study of behavior. That is very interesting. We know that, for example, different organisms are subject to different evolutionary times and different reproduction schemes. So how do you see or can you give us some examples of the difference from different organisms on this evolution of behavior? So most of my work doesn’t actually focus on that particular question.

5:37Generally, sort of these long -term questions. However, there’s a really cool example, behavior sort of changing very, very quickly in blackcaps. And that was a migratory behavior. And that was to do with climate change. I don’t remember the exact details, but what they found was that these little birds have actually shifted their migration patterns and that they’re now actually passing that information on to the next generation. So it’s shifting where those birds are actually moving and how individuals are learning about that behavior. And so what I would expect is that over time, you’re actually going to see a full shift to the birds all moving in the same direction rather than the old sort of pathway.

6:17So it was a very, very quick shift. It occurred in about 30 years we started to see these shifts. But if you think about behavior a little bit more broadly, pretty much everything that we do is shaped by what we’re carrying in our genes, but also about our environment. So behaviors are like morphological traits and physiological traits. They change with the pressures in the environment. So as soon as you have a change or a stress in the environment, that has the capacity to then promote behavior moving in a sort of a different direction. If you think about classically like speciation, events where you see two new species forming, that causes those sort of big speciation events, so maybe something like a flood separating two populations, will not only lead to changes in the genes, but it also leads to changes in the behaviors. And then those sort of pathways diverge and you end up on different evolutionary tracks. I’m not sure if that answered your question, but I hope that it did. Yeah, I think it does. And also with what you said, I’m thinking that behaviors as these other traits that you mentioned may have like this plasticity of other traits depending on the circumstances and environmental conditions, maybe. So, yeah, we tend to think about behavior as being generally somewhat flexible. Some behaviors are not as flexible than others. So by flexible, we just sort of mean the capacity to change relatively

7:47quickly. And so for a long time, people have understood that compared to something like a morphological trait, a behavioral trait can change generally quite quickly. Now, some traits or some behavioral traits. don’t change very fast so if you think about what we might call a sort of instinctual behaviors like pecking behavior in baby birds sort of pecking towards a stimulus that’s under a very strong genetic control and there’s a lot of reasons for that the main one being that if the baby bird doesn’t perform the behavior it doesn’t get food so you don’t want to mess around with that sort of stuff too much but when we’re starting to think about the flexibility of behaviors You want an animal to be able to respond to something in its environment, particularly if there’s change, because otherwise that animal is going to die. If there’s a massive change in the environment, so let’s start thinking about things like urbanization, where you’re getting new foods coming into environments and similar.

8:47If animals don’t try new foods, they could potentially starve because their food source is declining. If they don’t come out because they’re too scared because there’s people around, then they also might starve because they’re never going to come out and they don’t eat. So it becomes sort of a necessity to be somewhat flexible. That sounds maybe a little bit negative, but there’s some really cool examples of behaviors which have shown this plasticity or that flexibility. And it’s led to some really interesting, should we say, conflicts maybe between people, but I think it’s fascinating nonetheless. And so the best example that I could think about is in Sydney, in Australia, there are cockatoos. And for those of you who don’t know cockatoos, cockatoos are very loud and annoying birds, parrots. They’re really clever. And what they’ve done is they’ve actually learned how to open trash bins. You know, the big wheelie bins that people put their rubbish in. And they’ve learned how to open those and then gain access to the rubbish bins and get food from the rubbish bins. And naturally, you can imagine that this causes a huge amount of mess. So it’s led to sort of an evolutionary arms race between humans and cockatoos, as cockatoos have to learn more and more intricate techniques for opening the bins because people are using more and more intricate techniques to keep their bins closed. And this is moving really, really fast. The birds are learning through cultural exchange, basically, or social learning. They’re

10:19learning really, really quickly how to open these bins just by watching other individuals. And it seems like urban environments are also particularly good for sort of pushing flexibility of behavior. There’s another really great example of crows in Japan that have learned how to take walnuts, put them on the road on a pedestrian crossing when the traffic light is red. and then move off the road again traffic light goes green the cars come running over they’ll come driving over they they crush the nut traffic light goes red and the little crows walk back out on the pedestrian crossing and eat the nuts so they don’t get run over by the cars which i think is really clever so some of these behaviors emerge really really fast and they really really quick at adjusting and changing and so i think that’s the beauty of It does tend to be able to evolve or change very, very quickly compared to some of our other traits. I have a question. Well, actually, you study individual differences among the groups and we can make generalizations considering the behavior of an animal, of a group of an animal, if we take it to an individual level. because it’s going to have a big variation. And of course, some individuals are going to have a crazy behavior compared to the other ones, which I observed in the spider. So why is it important to study or understand these traits, individual traits,

11:52and how they are contributing, for example, to the population, and how these can have an impact in the survival? Also, we can transfer that one into humans, because we are here. I think people in general have been very focused on ecosystems and there’s a good reason for that because animals can’t survive without the ecosystem so you know they they need a place to live and so if you’re conserving at a at a broad level you’re conserving the organisms in it so that makes a lot of sense however I think it’s equally important to look at the bottom so I think it’s really important to look at the individuals because As we know from people, everybody’s different. Everybody’s got their own quirks and individuals respond differently. And some individuals are just naturally more resilient than others. And that extends to animals too. And I think a lot of people forget that. And I think also people forget that an individual is the one that is carrying the genes.

12:56And the gene is the ultimate unit on which selection is going to act. I mean, you don’t have selection without really having those genes from which your traits ultimately arise. So I think for me, we have to think about the individual because the individuals that make it from one generation to the next are the ones that are contributing to natural selection and evolution. And some individuals will just be naturally more resilient.

13:25than others some individuals will just cope better with stress and if we just come back to humans everybody knows somebody who’s a little bit more anxious or somebody who’s a risk taker or maybe a little bit more neurotic everybody knows somebody who’s a little bit different and sometimes people you might know somebody who falls apart at a very small thing another person just brushes it off and animals are exactly the same and I’ve seen it with my work with mosaic -tailed rats.

13:54So they’re a little native rat that we have here in Australia. And individuals are so different that it becomes hard to sort of generalize what outcome you might actually expect. So yes, generally, we can look at an average and say, on average, a population is going to do this. But the individuals within that population are what’s actually really interesting because That’s where we get innovation.

14:20That’s where we get new behaviors emerging. And so for me, I think people really shouldn’t forget that it’s the individuals that make up the populations that are then the ones who are going to be driving change and particularly innovative behaviors and similar. We know that you have worked with different group of animals in this behavior research. What are the difference between studying the behavior of contrasting animal groups, like, for example, invertebrates versus mammals or reptiles? I think every different set of animals has its own set of challenges. So particularly with me working with rodents and similar, anything that has a spine or a backbone. There’s a lot of red tape associated with working with them through animal ethics. And, you know, you’ve got to really consider the welfare of their animals, which is important. And then on the other side, when you look at invertebrates, most people don’t care. They don’t necessarily think about the welfare of animals, which can actually become really important if you’re studying insects in a laboratory environment or a captive environment, because they have hormones too. And they experience stress too. And they experience fear. By sort of not taking that into account, we sort of forget that, again, these are individual animals that are responding to their environment around them.

15:40And we can’t just make the assumption that an invertebrate, just because it doesn’t have a backbone, isn’t going to necessarily respond in a similar manner to a vertebrate. I also think, you know, when we think about invertebrates, there’s so many sort of behaviors that are cool. and new and emerging and again some of the classic studies by von frisch in like the 40s 50s somewhere around there was on the littlest things it was on bees yeah so i think a lot of our insights actually come from studying these sort of lesser should we say lesser known taxa or lesser known groups animal groups Everybody tends to focus, or maybe everybody is a bit of a strong statement, but a lot of people tend to focus on the things which are iconic and we can see and maybe is rare or is threatened by, you know, their conservation is threatened. And I think people sort of forget that often it’s the little things which are driving systems. So many of our insects, for example, are important pollinators, but so little of their natural behavior is actually understood. So if you go to mammals, lots of people know about lots of mammal behavior things. When you come to insects, so little is known. And just to give you an example, some of the work that we’ve been doing, we’ve been working on a species of tarantula here in Australia. And it’s been around for a

17:12long time. It’s not like it’s brand new to science and nobody’s ever seen it. But the babies stay with the mom. And this is the first time we’re recording this in a tarantula species in Australia. And I’m pretty certain people have noticed it. They just haven’t bothered to record it. And it’s the same thing with trapdoor spiders. Trapdoor spider babies stay with their mother and it leads to a social system known as subsociality. But nobody talks about it. You know, it’s just, it’s not seen as important, probably because they’re trapdoor spiders and, you know. What do we know about spiders that some of them kill people?

17:52And I find it fascinating that people sort of forget some of these taxa. And particularly they offer sort of really rich areas for studying behaviours just because, you know, lots of people haven’t studied them before. And I have to add that, for example, the perception and also the knowledge that we have about them and also how we get that information and how the public… get related to the information, for example, related with invertebrates, with cockroaches that are like, oh, sorry, well, it’s a pest.

18:23Well, actually have an important function when they are in the forest. But also like a little beetles that are really important when they just recycle or they… pieces from other vertebrates and then they come the ecosystem completely relied on them on this tiny little animal but then each at each individual level is not like they are they’re robots tiny little robots just behaving in the same way but also recently has been shown that they feel pain that they have something that is called nociceptors that is the ability of feel that pain And it’s not only a reaction or a response to just run away. So that goes to, as you mentioned before, into the animal ethics who have to be expanded. But there’s another invertebrates that are the octopus, for example.

19:18It’s amazing how these animals are so brilliant, so intelligent. But then they are invertebrates. Well, it’s actually funny you say that because at least here in Australia and every country is different. So every country has its own set of guidelines, its own set of rules that they try and follow when it comes to animal welfare. But here in Australia, cephalopods are considered vertebrates because you have to get an animal ethics permit to actually work with them. And also decapods. So things like lobsters and crabs and similar. So I think there’s the capacity for change. It’s just slow. Do you research focus on the behavior of rodents and spiders? As you mentioned previously, could you share some of the most fascinating behaviors you have observed in this species and how these behaviors stand out compared to similar animals in other parts of the world? You already mentioned one amazing one that was this tarantula. For people that have heard before, I want to make a big quote that these ancient spiders, solitary spiders, haven’t been reported at least before as a social act. animals but in the we have the older the new ones that they call the new spiders and they have been reported like a social so that’s really a big remark that you are mentioning before the first of this tarantula that we know of this particular genus in australia actually there’s

20:50been several observations of the sub -sociality in megalomorphs so megalomorphs are spiders that are considered old world spiders. So your tarantulas, your funnel web spiders, not the American funnel web spiders, the Australian ones, mouse spiders or their relatives and similar, trapdoors, those sorts of things. But compared to our new world spiders, so the web building spiders, there’s very few that have actually been studied. I’m working on a project with an honors student here at JCU on this particular topic. And we… Found a review paper that was written, I think, in 2014 that actually reported some of these behaviors or sub -sociality in some of these sort of megalomorph spiders. But their list was relatively small.

21:40We’ve managed to actually expand that list by just delving more deeply into the literature and looking at some sort of newer literature that has come out since then. But even so, there’s very few papers that have come out looking. specifically at things like trapdoor spiders. So I’m pretty certain that trapdoor spiders in general are subsocial or the offspring stay with their mothers, but it’s just not reported. And some really cool behaviors are documented in these spiders, which you wouldn’t necessarily think because, hey, it’s a spider. Spiders are creepy and they’re crawly and they have venom and they’re horrible.

22:23But we’ve actually found some cases or from going through the literature, the mother actually provisions the babies. So she actually catches the prey, mashes it up for the babies, and then leaves the food for the babies to come and eat. And we’ve seen this in our little tarantula here in Australia, which is really awesome. So it sort of opens our eyes a little bit to the fact that these animals are much more maternal than we might have given them credit for. And I think for me, it’s… Parental care behavior is really, it’s something that I’m fascinated with. And it started many, many years ago when I was doing my PhD, because I was working on a little species of mouse. And again, mice are viewed as pests.

23:05People don’t like them. They eat all the crops, etc. But this little species of mouse is the only mouse in Africa where the fathers actually provide parental care. And it only occurs in certain areas. And it’s very much driven by environment and population density. So it’s highly flexible. The males only show the behavior under particular conditions. So this changes the entire social system throughout the year. And it switches from having individual females raising young alone to females in groups raising young with a male who provides care. Sometimes those males don’t provide care. Sometimes they just roam between females. It’s driven largely by what’s going on in the environment, which causes these huge massive shifts. And that’s really what got me interested in actually understanding the sort of the mechanisms and the development of these behaviors. Another example that I can give you, you were just asking about, you know, some of the really cool things that I might have found out compared to, you know, other species or similar.

24:14There’s this general understanding in terms of life history. that you have trade -offs between things like energy production, so producing sugars and similar, and testosterone, so formating and similar. I found the case in that sort of same trade -off in a little species of mouse, the mosaic -tailed rat. It’s never been shown before, and yet we showed it. But it’s also, it’s not so simple as just being a physiological change or a physiological response. It’s also related to the personality of the individual. So individuals, particularly individuals which are bolder, actually it’s a bigger cost for them, should we say. So basically, in order to produce more testosterone to be bolder, they have a very large energetic cost associated with that. But the shyer ones don’t because they’re not expending testosterone.

25:15to be bold. So it’s a pretty cool sort of system. I think there’s just, there’s so much to be learned out there. And a colleague of ours, Dr. Misha Raul, she’s just been using social media to find out whether individuals, you know, different species solve problems. And she’s found lots of new animals solving problems innovatively that has never been seen or never been reported, at least in the scientific literature. So there’s so much new stuff out there. It’s really hard to pinpoint one individual thing that’s cool.

25:51Wow. And how do you think that reporting and publishing these kind of behaviors may challenge the common perceptions that scientists and general public have about these animals? So I think there’s two different things there. I think a lot of the general public… sort of don’t have access to academic work. A lot of them are hidden behind paywalls, although with open access publishing these days, it’s a lot easier for them. But science writing tends to be dry, tends to be clinical.

26:27It’s not friendly to generally read. If you think about it, you’re not going to take it home and read it to your children in bed. So I think a lot of our findings tend to sort of be missed by the general public. Or it’s missed and only certain parts of the public will access it because they have a vested interest in it or are really keen to learn more about it. Citizen science, I think, has really been useful for bringing science to the general public. But again, it becomes challenging because there are limitations to what you can actually achieve with citizen science. And again, it comes down to things like permitting and similar. I think we need to do better with science communication. But as an academic, there’s not a lot of time in my day to be able to do these. So I think that the challenge is how do we get the information out there as an academic, as a researcher? And I think also the challenge is to minimize sort of mistakes that get made along the way. So we can, for example, put out a press release. and say, hey, we’ve got this really cool paper, the public should read it, etc. I’ve had several instances where the reporters have just misinterpreted what we’ve said or changed the meaning without necessarily, not being vindictive, but changing the meaning because they think it sounds better. And I think

28:00that’s an inherent problem is things get lost in translation. To give you an example on Misha Rao’s work, we put out a press release about a paper, which was pretty cool. We got interviewed, which was great. And all of a sudden we were exposing our little rats to razor blades. And we hadn’t mentioned the word razor anywhere, but we had used the word pencil eraser. So all of a sudden it was blown out of proportion. And we were also talking about things like problem solving. And all of a sudden the title of the news article was something about NASA -style space tests or something similar. So I think sometimes things get a little bit lost in translation.

28:45So we do need to do a bit better with our science communication. Because we like to explore the human side of the researchers in this program, we… would like to know how important are the relations between students and mentors from the perspective of both? What do you think about this? I have been very lucky to be both. Yes, you were my main supervisor. So if I start from my own personal experience of being a student, I was very, very lucky. I had an advisor or a mentor who… Continues to be my mentor to this day and is a very, very close friend of mine to this day. But he was strong enough to give me independence, but also knew when I needed help without me necessarily knowing that I needed the help. He was supportive, but he also pushed.

29:44And he pushed me pretty hard. But I think at the end of the day, I needed that. I needed that discipline, if that makes sense. But he was still good enough to let me have a bit of free reign and to let me develop my ideas in my own way. So he didn’t constrain my thinking. And I think it’s very important as a supervisor to try and not constrain the thinking of your students because they have different opinions to you. And, you know, we all have our own idea about what something means or how it can be interpreted. And I think as a supervisor, it’s our job to guide a student, but also to understand that they may come up with a different interpretation to the results that they’re getting. I think also sometimes as a supervisor, it becomes necessary to sort of work with the student that you have, not with the student that you’d like them to be, if that makes sense. but also to accept that they’re human beings and that they have other things going on in their lives. So to be patient when they need that time, because not everybody will work at the same pace. Not everybody will be a publishing superstar. Some people are, but not everybody will. So it’s being, again, using that word flexible as a supervisor and adaptable.

31:11So allow a student to grow in their role rather than forcing them down a pathway and sort of trying to you know make sure that they’re going down the path that you as a supervisor want as a student i relied a lot on the emotional support provided by my supervisor more so i think than my family although they gave me fantastic support but i think your supervisor the supervisors and students know the project and sometimes the best person that you can rant at or whose shoulder you can cry on is your supervisor. And I think the supervisor needs to really be willing to deal with those sorts of moments. I also think it’s important that the supervisor doesn’t do the work of the student. I think from my own experience, it becomes very, very easy when, you know, maybe for whatever reason a student isn’t delivering. It’s very tempting to then just want to do the work to help. But I think you have to take a step back and you’ve got to let that person make a mistake or let that person go at their own pace because that’s going to be the best for them at the end of the day. You can hold their hand and when they fall, you can help them up, but you can’t always carry them.

32:31And I think that’s a, for me, that’s a lesson I’m still learning. I do tend to be a little bit of a mother hen as Linda, you know. And it’s just, I think it’s trying to find that balance of when to let them go and when to make sure that you’re holding on to them. And my supervisor is an incredible person for bringing out the best in you and motivating you. And I don’t know what it is specifically about him, but I can just say it was the package that came with. And he had a fundamental understanding of me, of this, which I don’t know if other people would have seen because I’m my own complex human. And I think him being an animal behavior person helped with that because he could see me as an individual and he could see that I wasn’t the same as somebody else. And he knew what he could say that was appropriate, that would push me as opposed to, uh sort of pushing me down or anything like that and i’d like to think at the end of the day if if i could emulate what he is and what he was to me if i could emulate that as a supervisor that’s what my goal would ultimately be and i would hope that my students see me in the same way i i completely agree In a moment, I remember

34:01pretty well someone mentioned that, for example, doing a PhD or a master, well, especially a PhD was like a marriage and get for 40 years or in US and other places like a seven years. And then actually, I think that is the supervisors are the 90 % of the success of the PhD and a master or any project and the relationship that they have with student supervisor is. Fundamentally important because as you mentioned before, it’s not only about the researchers and we are just like robots working without stopping. We have a life, we have a family, we have the same problems that other person has. And understanding that, I think that your point is really important because you study the behavior and I think that you’re more conscious about that. But I always tell my friends like, look. Have a conversation with your supervisor or your possible prospects of supervisor. And then if you see that something is off, just don’t go for it. Because it can be amazing love, but you’re going to suffer so much if you don’t have the support. And I think that the clear communication is important and being independent and just pushing and nudging a little bit is also important. Supporting but not doing everything for the student, that’s amazing. And I was really lucky. That’s great.

35:28And well, this next one is in two parts. The first one is, how do you see the future of animal behavior research developing? And the other part is, do you consider that the technological advances have enabled breakthroughs in the field? I think one of the sort of movements now is largely away from the big iconic things and more moving towards understanding the little things, as I like to call them. Also understanding that not all individuals behave the same and not all behaviors are the same. So what we might consider, I’m just going to use a very general sort of foraging in bees is not the same as foraging in lions. And I think there’s more of an appreciation there. I know that’s a very extreme example and it’s ridiculous, but you understand, I think, what I mean. And I think, you know, in terms of the technologies…

36:25The study of animal behavior historically was very much you go out, you sit down, you open your eyes, and you watch. That was classic ethology. And if you think about Jane Goodall’s work, she sat in the forest and watched chimpanzees and documented what they were doing. In the other case, when you had people studying behavior in the laboratory, they would… basically putting animals in situations and going, what did they do? So highly, highly, highly controlled environments, changing one thing and going, what happened?

37:00But it was all very regulated and very controlled. But again, it all came down to using these two little things on your face called your eyes to just watch what happened. And I think now with technology, with particularly things like AI and machine learning, all of those sorts of things, It’s increased the potential for studying behavior. Because let’s face it, if you’re studying an elephant and you want to track that elephant over its lifetime, well, you’re probably going to die before it dies. Elephants live to like, what, 70 odd years? And they move places. So unless you’re going to sit there watching them with your notebook for 70 odd years, which is what they used to do in the old days, it’s just not feasible. you know these days and especially for like cryptic species and very rare species slogging around in a rainforest you might never actually see your species if you’re trying to use those sort of traditional methods so i think with the with particularly new technologies or maybe someone so new anymore it allows us to track animals and watch animals in ways that we haven’t before um so there’s been some really cool studies um on movement patterns and navigation in ants For example, so they’ve been using different technologies. So putting like little accelerometers or similar onto the ants themselves and then tracking where they go. So you don’t actually have to physically watch them. You get your computer to watch it for you. And you’ve got all these cool behavioral analysis programs that can do

38:32all of the analysis for you. It actually makes life very boring if I think about it. But there you go. But, you know, we can also, yeah, if you think about a very basic thing like a camera trap. I mean, a camera trap is relatively simple, but what it’s doing now is it’s allowing us to actually observe those rare species that you just can’t see because as a human, we go into an area and make a lot of noise and things hide away. So by putting these in there, we can see rare species. We can see novel behaviors. We can get sensors and recorders that can measure physiology. We can measure all sorts of behaviors and similar without actually having to be there.

39:12You don’t actually have to see the animal in order to record its behavior, which I think is a huge step. It’s a huge change for animal behavior research. And I think also, you know, if we think about how behaviors were analyzed, and Linda can attest to this probably, but you collect hours and hours and hours worth of data. And to analyze that physically by hand takes hours and hours and hours and hours. I remember for my PhD back in the day, I used a VHS and videos and I sat with a stopwatch and my remote control for my TV and I’d watch and then I’d stop, I’d record the time and then I’d watch again. Sometimes I’d have to go backwards a little bit and then watch again. So it’s just with the analysis software that we have now, it just makes analyzing behave like… the data so much easier. And I also heard about a really cool example. I think it was last year, somebody was working on bird calls and they were actually looking at using, you know, machine learning to learn templates to basically pick these out of thousands and thousands and thousands of hours of birds calls. So in Australia, there’s a big bioacoustic array, which is all of these acoustic sensors put out all over different parts of Australia. And it’s collecting bush

40:43sounds. So it’s collecting the sounds that are naturally occurring. But you can imagine it’s collecting days, hours, weeks, months, years worth of data. And we just physically cannot sift through that. We just can’t do it anymore. There’s just too much data. So with… some of these sort of machine learning patterns and algorithms and AI, we can just make them do the work. They can do it faster and we can still get the answers now. And so I think there’s been a huge shift in traditional animal behavior methods to more incorporating these new technologies and similar.

41:22I’m still a dinosaur so I haven’t really incorporated these. But who knows, maybe in the future I will also join the ranks of the AI -initiated. Your research on resilience and adaptability in animals is especially relevant given today’s environmental issues. How do you think the study of animal behavior can inspire or inform human approaches to coping with global change? Oh, that’s a tough one. I think probably climate… There’s an emphasis on climate change. And yes, I think climate change is something that we need to be worried about.

42:03For me, in terms of behavior, I think animals will respond to climate change. Some will go extinct. That’s just the natural order of things. Some are going to persist. That’s just the natural order of things. That’s obviously my own feeling there. I think one of the biggest… changes though is urbanization and I know it’s not climate change but I think humans are transforming landscapes so fast that it’s encroaching on on animals and animals have to adjust their behaviors very very quickly and I think knowing how animals are responding to those changes allows us as people to sort of make better informed decisions about what’s what we are changing and how it affects us in the long term so looking if we focus on how animals are responding to things like fragmentation it shifts our perspective because then we go hang on a second but if we live in a city which is just bricks and cement and tar and you know high -rises it’s not aesthetically pleasing for us either so One of the things that we might potentially do is shift our focus and go, well, people need to live in cities, but how can we incorporate animals and beautiful trees and forest in our

43:36city? Because it’ll improve our own health, it’ll improve our own emotional well -being and mental health, for example, but we can then incorporate conservation in it as well. So I think… Specifically asking how the study of behavior can inspire humans. I think for me, I don’t need climate change to be inspired. That’s just me. I think it’s challenging. I really do. For me, I find that it’s a question that it’s difficult to answer for me. I think we can use it to shape what we do and how we manage. But specifically behavior itself. I think it’s got to be incorporated with other things as well. So it’s, you know, specifically if you’re talking about climate change, it’s not just behavior that’s going to be affected.

44:25It’s going to be physiology as well and physiological responses. You know, and if we think about, you know, how these animals are going to respond, we’re going to respond in a similar way because we’re animals at the base of it. I’m just trying to think of some really… interesting examples of people that have used, should we say, animal behaviors or animal ways to try and better manage themselves. So you’ve probably all heard about biomimicry. Biomimicry is basically using what nature has done for the benefit of people and to try and improve things that we do. So I think it’s in Zimbabwe. They’ve actually, Zimbabwe or Botswana, somewhere in Africa. southern africa they’ve actually built buildings that are based on termite mounds and because they’ve built those buildings in that sort of structure they don’t need air conditioning because the buildings naturally cool themselves and so if you can design something like that which doesn’t use electricity hey that’s a win for the planet and climate change but it’s built on a natural design so it’s using those behaviors of those animals to inform us to construct in a different way. So I think we can use that, those sorts of things, but I think we can also use it to manage ourselves and basically our world better, if that makes sense. Yes. Thank

45:57you, Tasmin. And just to finalise this exciting interview. Would you like to send a message to the public and all the audience from Latin America and from Australia who is listening to you? I can, I guess. I think be mindful of the little things. Be mindful of the things you don’t necessarily like because they’re individuals. They have their own unique behaviors and they’re pretty important somewhere down the line. If as an individual you think you are important to other people and other things that you’re doing, the animals themselves, the individual animals themselves are just as important. So next time you see a rodent or a snake or a spider, don’t persecute it just because that’s what it is. It’s just trying to do its job. It’s just trying to be what it is. And it is its own unique individual. Maybe think twice about, the things you may not like yeah that’s a good one yeah you see that you mentioned these different behavior traits in invertebrates like these arthropods the spiders and and these animals how far down the the evolutionary tree we can go to and say this this organism have behavioral traits like we can expect protozoans to have

47:29behavioral traits or things like this i think even if you look at in organisms which are genetic clones so if we take a bacterium and you clone it they still don’t respond exactly the same way i think that they in general will do the same thing but how they do it might vary somewhat and i think that’s that’s the key is at what level like where do we see those tiny little nuances or variations coming in. So for example, if we take bacteria and we measure how long it takes for them to ooze their way from one side of the petri dish to another, I would say with let’s say 95 % confidence that they are not going to move at the same rate. They’re not going to move in exactly the same way. And that’s individual variation. it’s it’s a a capacity for being different if that makes sense and so if we can see that like right down in bacteria in archaea i think that the capacity for that sort of level of individuality is very much there that’s obviously my own opinion i don’t study bacteria so i actually don’t know if i’m just talking rubbish um but i i would imagine that if you can measure Very simple behaviors like movement. I’d say that you’re not going

49:00to see each bacterium doing exactly the same thing. And all a behavior is, very, very simply, all a behavioral behavior is, is a response to a stimulus. That is all it is. So if we can show the animal or the organism is responding to a stimulus, it is behaving. That’s how we know plants behave. And classically, people don’t. think of a plant as being something that can behave yeah for example how they respond to music or to noises or vibrations or the way that you talk to them there’s some really cool studies that shows that or how they connect between them they might say oh it’s cool thank you very much that’s me for accepting this invitation and for sharing all your amazing knowledge Thank you for having me. It’s been a wild journey. Of course.

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