Research

Prey use publicly available information about local habitat conditions to balance the conflicting demands of predator avoidance and other activities such as foraging and reproduction. However, environments undergo both short and long term changes resulting from a combination of natural and anthropogenic pressures, leading to increased uncertainty (the incomplete or imperfect information regarding local conditions) among prey animals. A major challenge for ecologists is to determine how prey can balance these conflicts when faced with ecological uncertainty. Given that the combined effects of global climate change, invasive species and anthropogenic habitat degradation are expected to dramatically alter environments, the need to explore the effects of ecological uncertainty is key.

As a cognitive and behavioural ecologist, I examine ‘how aquatic prey use public information to adjust behavioural trade-offs to current environmental conditions’. Recently, I have focussed on neophobic predator recognItion as an inducible response to elevated predation risk. However, mean predation risk is only one of many determinants of the ecological uncertainty experienced by prey. My long term objective for the next five years is to address the key question of how ecological uncertainty shapes the expression of neophobic predator avoidance and foraging patterns of prey and what are the cognitive cost associated with neophobia.