How STRANGE are your animals?
Happy to have helped edit this fascinating piece on bias in animal behaviour studies, in Nature today: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01751-5 Ten years ago, researchers noted that social psychology experiments don't really tell us how people behave; they tell us how Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) people behave, because the vast majority of these studies have been done on WEIRD people from US universities. Now a different set of researchers are highlighting the same problems in animal studies: the animals used in many such studies are STRANGE (see the full piece to get the acronym spelled out). Honeybees learn better in the morning, so how well they do depends on when you test them; pheasants, monkeys, mice, fish and crows may behave differently depending on their genetics, how they were raised, and even their personality (bolder animals may select themselves for study by stepping into traps or into experimental zones). So... anima...