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We hope this works

As humans we have always wanted to understand what animals are doing and why are they doing it. Therefore, we decided to conduct an experimental design to try and understand whether the littorina snails would react to a predator and hide in either rocks or algae. After a long and hard session of brainstorming we decided on a protocol in which we should see a result. However, we were forgetting one essential thing, animals do whatever they want, and in our case, they just decided to escape…

We had to rethink our experimental design to avoid this sad outcome, and in the end, we managed to keep them inside the tanks. However, they still didn’t seem to realise there were crabs in the tank as well, and they directly moved towards them. This was certainly not the result we were hoping for.  This is the reality of studying animal behaviour; you feel elated when the organisms you are dealing with do what you are expecting of them and very annoyed when they just do the opposite!

Figure 1. Final setup of the experimental design.

All in all, if you want to study animal behaviour you need to be prepared to spend time changing your experimental design multiple times and not get the result you had hoped for. Apart from all of that, studying animal behaviour is great and very rewarding when it works out. For our study it is yet to be determined if at the end of it all we will be elated or annoyed.

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