Episode 29 (Season 3, Episode 2) - Tanya Shoot

Tanya's research is at the intersection of behavioural ecology, evolution, and animal and plant cognition. The main questions they ask revolves around why and how organisms make the decisions they do and how personality, experiences, and environment impact these decisions. This research is both multi-taxa and multi-methods, spanning empirical investigations of nest-building flexibility in zebra finches during their Undergraduate and Masters at Western University, group decision-making in zebrafish and guppies with manipulated personality compositions, and theoretical modelling of the impact of personality in fruit fly populations for their PhD at Wilfrid Laurier University. Most recently, Tanya has had the opportunity to construct a theoretical framework of what studying plant information processing should look like as a postdoc at the University of Alberta, along with designing empirical experiments to test the framework.  Tanya plans to continue this line of research in their relatively new position at CUE and is excited to see how the different branches of plant behaviour compare to what we know about animal behaviour. We talked about a lot of stuff, we made fun of Noam a bit, ok, maybe that was just me, and we of course did a deep dive on Tanya's plant cognition work.mp3 download