Math4Science

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Behavioral Ecologist

Where do animals live? How long do they live? How many offspring (babies) do they produce? How far do they travel? How do they communicate? These are the sorts of questions that behavioral ecologists like John Hoogland ask about the animals they study. Zoologist Hoogland studies prairie dogs: he watches them from a tower every day, for five months of every year.  His colleague, Charles Brown, analyzes the colonies cliff swallows live in and the ways their behavior and morphology (e.g. their wings, tails, legs, and bills) change in response to their environment. And Behavioral Ecologist Jeanne Altmann studies the family relationships of baboons in Kenya’s Amboseli National Park. Biological Anthropologist Erin Vogel studies the behavior of orangutans to help us understand how early humans adapted to changes in their environment. She examines the relationships between the food they eat and their energy levels and general health.