Question: How do you study behaviour with animals and understand how humans are changing the natural environment

Sophie Nedelec answered on 10 Nov 2016:

I study animal behaviour by observing animals and sometimes doing experiments, where we change one thing and see how behaviour changes. For example in my PhD I played the sounds of boat engines to fish and watched their behaviour. I found out that fish got stressed, didn’t eat as much and were more aggressive when they heard noise. This links to understanding how humans are changing the natural environment; boat noise and other traffic noise is becoming more and more widespread. So we are changing the environment by affecting animal behaviour by introducing new stimuli like noise, light and chemicals.