Fantastic beasts and how to study them: rethinking experimental animal behavior

Abstract

Humans have been trying to understand animal behavior at least since recorded history. Recent rapid development of new technologies has allowed us to make significant progress in understanding the physiological and molecular mechanisms underlying behavior, a key goal of neuroethology. However, there is a tradeoff when studying animal behavior and its underlying biological mechanisms: common behavior protocols in the laboratory are designed to be replicable and controlled, but they often fail to encompass the variability and breadth of natural behavior. This Commentary proposes a framework of 10 key questions that aim to guide researchers in incorporating a rich natural context into their experimental design or in choosing a new animal study system. The 10 questions cover overarching experimental considerations that can provide a template for interspecies comparisons, enable us to develop studies in new model organisms and unlock new experiments in our quest to understand behavior.

Through an animal’s eye: the implications of diverse sensory systems in scientific experimentation

“…6. Consider species' lifestyle, lifecycles and ecology: the early bird finds a tired lab rat Finally, ecology and habitat are important aspects of an animal's behaviour and should be considered when designing experiments (E1-E3, table 1) [123]. Rats and mice have been used widely and for over a century in psychological and behavioural research, but only recently did a few experimenters account for the fact that these rodents are nocturnal and started testing them in darkness (in practice, under red light that is not visible to them [124,125]; E3, table 1).…”