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Animal Behaviour 91 (2014) vex

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Animal Behaviour

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Invited Contributions

An academic life: researching and teaching animal behaviour

One ofmy favourite books is a small volume edited by John Brock-man called When we were kids: How a child becomes a scientist(Brockman, 2004). Nearly all of the 27 autobiographical essays areengaging, but it is one by physicist Lee Smolin rather than by any ofthe biologists that I enjoyed most. Why do I like Brockman’s book?In part, I think it is because it allowedme to reflect onmy own careerand be surprised and pleased to detect commonalities, and partlybecause I thought itmight inspire theundergraduates I teach. Interestin these autobiographical accounts may also be akin to what makesHello magazine popular: an inherent fascination with other people.Nosiness, like gossip, may be valuable especially if, in this case, it en-courages young scientists to read about how others got started.

There have long been biographical or autobiographical accountsof scientific superstars, like CharlesDarwin, Albert Einstein andGre-gor Mendel, researchers few of us can ever emulate. For those of usinterested in animal behaviour we have to thank Donald Dewsbury(1985; see also Drickamer & Dewsbury, 2010) for starting the trendof inviting scientists ofmore ordinary status towrite about those as-pects of their childhood that shaped their subsequent careers.

We are all products of our circumstances, which I suppose is aninformal way of saying genes and environment. I was the product ofconventional and conservative parents, but fortunate to grow up inthe liberal 1960s at a timewhen the university systemwas expand-ing. My father, who left school at 15, was a product of his era too,and one in which bird watching was starting to become popular.He encouraged me to watch birds and he also took me to watchLeeds United, but my lack of interest in the latter was so obvioushe never took me again (he was more successful with my brother).Bird watching suited my nonsporting inclinations; I liked being onmy own, at least when I was young. My protracted bird-watchingapprenticeship served me well, honing my field-working skillsand forging a deep affinity for birds and natural history as a whole.My mother (who was an artist) and one of her uncles (who was a

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2014.03.0040003-3472/� 2014 The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour. Published by Els

keen birdwatcher) encouraged me to produce written and illus-trated accounts of my birding adventures (which I still have).

A family holiday in NorthWales when I was 11 included a trip toBardsey Island with my father for one glorious, unforgettable day.Bardsey transformed me: choughs wheeled and squealed in a clearazure sky; the sea pounded against thrift-covered cliffs, and afterseeing a young man sitting with a telescope and notebook, my fa-ther said to me: ‘You could do something like that’. I was engulfedby a sense of wellbeing and optimism and although barely a teen-ager, it was as though I had found what I had been looking for.Indeed, that day marked a life-long affair with islands and seabirds.

I’malways encouragedwhen I read of successful scientistswhoseschool careers were as unpleasant and undistinguished as minesince it demonstrates that there’s more to achievement than aca-demic or sporting prowess. With corporal punishment high on theagenda, I hated school until I was 17 after which the beatingsstopped and I began to value the encouragement and inspiration Ireceived from one or two teachers. I wanted to do biology, but thatdoor was firmly closed, they said, because I had no aptitude for lan-guage (or indeed much else) and as a biologist I would need to beable to read and speak German. It barely mattered since I was notconsidered university material anyway. A teacher once told us thatwewere all wasting our time and none of uswould get to university.If I wanted an outdoor life, my best hope, they said, was forestry.Luckily for me, the rapid and careless expansion of the universitysystem in the 1960s resulted in a reduction in entry standards thatnot only provided an opportunity for someone like myself, it alsoleft the German language languishing on the scientific sidelines.

Herons

To describe oneself as a birdwatcher today is almost the same asadmitting that you are a twitcher (to some, the lowest form of bird

evier Ltd.

Invited Contributions / Animal Behaviour 91 (2014) vexvi

watching). But when bird watching became popular in my father’sday there was little distinction betweenwatching birds for pleasureand watching them for study. The pioneering volumes by MaxNicholson, such as: How birds live (1927) and The art of bird-watch-ing (1931) and James Fisher’s spectacularly successful Watchingbirds (1941) treated these two strands as though they were almostthe same. What distinguished themwas data, or at least notes thatcomprised more than a mere list of species. It is easy for this tosound elitist: it isn’t meant to, and I enjoy seeing new species asmuch as any twitcher, but I was also intrigued by the behaviourof birds. And while I received plenty of encouragement, there wasprecious little guidance that would have helped me see the pointof studying birds.

None the less I persevered, my main teenage obsession beingherons, Ardea cinerea, whose U.K. population was thought to besuffering as a result of toxic chemicals such as dieldrin. Amid thisapparent decline I discovered a local abundance of herons in theWashburn Valley near my home and I began to ‘study’ their day-time roosts. These aggregations of up to 20 birds, sometimesreferred to as ‘standing grounds’ were unstudied and hence poorlyunderstood. Eventually I realized therewasn’t a great deal to under-stand; they were daytime roosts at which very little happened (theherons rested): end of story. The days I spent watching resting her-ons were not wasted, however. Far from it: I gained valuable expe-rience in observing, writing and thinking as I thrashed about on myown trying to understand what the birds might be doing. I evenwrote to David Lack in Oxford and Vero Wynne-Edwards in Aber-deen to seek advice. Both sent positive replies. Lack was brief, butWynne-Edwards, who had been brought up close to my home,wrote a full typed page telling me about his own boyhood observa-tions of birds. I had provided too little information for either ofthem to tell me anything useful, but the very fact that they repliedwas enormously encouraging.

Looking back, these were faltering steps. I knew vaguely what Iwanted to achieve but it was only on going to university, to readZoology at the University of Newcastle in the late 1960s, that Istarted to get an inkling of what science was all about. My degreewas such that I could channel my obsession with birds into almostevery course I took e at least in Zoology and Physiology: with Bot-any it was more difficult.

Very often careers are shaped by serendipitous events. One suchevent occurred in my first year as an undergraduate when StewartEvans, a schoolteacher with a Ph.D. in Zoology from Bristol (on thebehaviour of nereid worms), was appointed to a lectureship atNewcastle. He had recently discovered that birds were more inter-esting than worms and was fascinated by ‘social facilitation’: themechanisms that mediated synchronous behaviours such as theamazing amoeboid flocks of starlings as they go to roost. Stewart’sapproach was pragmatic and he studied small groups of cagedestrildid finches (e.g. Evans & Patterson, 1971). I could hardlybelieve my good fortune: I had kept and watched similar birdsthroughout my youth, and was virtually preadapted to undertakea final-year project with him. Stewart Evans fostered my interestin animal behaviour; we used Robert Hinde’s wonderful (butappallingly produced and deeply unaesthetic) textbook AnimalBehaviour (1966 Student Edition), and Stewart spent hourspatiently helping me to write up my heron studies in a scientificand publishable manner. In lectures he championed the work ofJohn Hurrell Crook (Crook, 1970a, 1970b), whom he had known atBristol and whom I later met. Crook was one of the most charis-matic people I ever encountered, and in 1998 I spent a memorableday talking with him while walking in the green rolling hills ofHastings Reservation, California, prior to the ISBE meeting in Asilo-mar. Despite his extraordinary help, Stewart remained a somewhatremote figure e to me at least: he was a keen sportsman and I

wasn’t, and he had the disconcerting habit of looking past you ashe spoke.

As an undergraduate I attended a conference on bird biology inOxford organized by David Lack. He had initiated these annual stu-dent conferences the year after he took over the directorship of theEdward Grey Institute of Field Ornithology (EGI) in 1945 as away toencourage undergraduates and also to check out potential researchstudents. Lack’s conference typically started on 1 January, appar-ently because he had no interest in celebrating the New Year, butalso I think because it constituted a test of student commitment.The EGI conference became part of my annual calendar: informal,stimulating and as a student presenting a paper, utterly terrifying,because the conference was also attended by several senior figures.As well as Lack himself these included Niko Tinbergen, Mike Cullenand Mick Southern from Oxford, and Arthur Cain, a colleague ofLack’s from Liverpool. There were other senior players too, depend-ing on the theme of the conference and the invited speakers. It is ameasure of the effectiveness of the EGI student conferences (whichstill take place, albeit less regularly) that almost every senior orni-thologist around today gave their first conference talk at one ofthese meetings (Birkhead, Wimpenny, & Montgomerie, 2014). Theconference format was conventional: an invited speaker in themorning, followed during the rest of the day by 20 minute studenttalks and questions. The first conferences I attended were in StHugh’s College on Banbury Road, Oxford and comprised about 20or 30 students. At the end of each day most of us retired to theRose and Crown on North Parade. David Lack was famous for goingto bed early e he needed a lot of sleep e and did not come to thepub, but other senior people did, including Arthur Cain who wasnot only kind and encouraging to students, he was also awonderfulraconteur. The opportunity to listen to and talk to established scien-tists in an informal settingwas exhilarating. My first EGI conferencetalke on herons resting (doing nothing)ewas dreadful, but ArthurCain enthusiastically asked me lots of questions and made me feelas though I was doing something right. I must have been for I wasoffered a place to undertake a D.Phil. at the EGI.

Guillemots

David Lack was my supervisor until he died, after which I wassupervised by Euan Dunn, and by Chris Perrins after he returnedfrom sabbatical in Australia. I studied guillemots, Uria aalge, onSkomer Island off the west coast of south Wales, another projectthat arose from ongoing concerns over declining seabird numbers.Oil pollution continued to be a threat, but another incident in theIrish Sea in the autumn of 1969 in which thousands of guillemotsdied for no apparent reason, raised the possibility that toxic chem-icals may have been responsible.

The main objective of my D.Phil. was to look at the populationbiology of guillemots, and I did, but I also had complete freedomto do whatever else I wanted. At Newcastle, Robin Baker, then apostdoc, had introduced the undergraduates in my year to theidea of sperm competition. He told us about individual selectionthinking and Geoff Parker’s wonderful studies of sexual selectionin dung flies (Parker, 1970), which together captured the sheerexcitement of doing science. Luckily, guillemots, despite being so-cially monogamous, were fabulously promiscuous, with frequentextrapair copulations. It was impossible, however, to do anythingother than observe guillemots, so my efforts to understand theirextrapair behaviour was limited. However, partly as a result ofreading Niko Tinbergen’s The herring gull’s world (1953) I believed(and still do) that if you are going to study a particular species,you need to know its behaviour in detail. With that in mind, I setout to construct an ethogram for the guillemot, and was duly crit-icized for it in my D.Phil. viva, being told that my approach was

Invited Contributions / Animal Behaviour 91 (2014) vex vii

rather ‘old fashioned’. I blamed myself for not justifying it better,but I have had no regrets for adopting that approach. It was a chal-lenge to try to understand why certain behaviours and displayswere performed in certain situations and Hinde’s textbook pro-vided exactly the right kind of hard-nosed advice about how totest such ideas. There was a special attraction in studying behav-iours associated with sperm competition: individual selectionthinking and the groundwork provided by Geoff Parker’s researchmeant that it was relatively easy to make clear predictions, and inmany cases to test them using no more than observationalmethods.

The ultimate goal, of course, was to know whether extrapaircopulations resulted in offspring. If these copulations did, thenthey might be adaptive. If they didn’t, I was wasting my time. Mo-lecular methods for establishing paternity were some time in thefuture. However, my boyhood experience with captive finches,including the zebra finch, made me realize that there might be away, using different colour morphs, of demonstrating that anextrapair copulation could result in offspring. Today, it seemsalmost unbelievable that in the mid-1980s this was not known. Infact, poultry researchers had known for a while, but the poultryliterature was virtually unknown to ornithologists and to thoseinterested in animal behaviour. Discovering the poultry literaturein the 1980s left me stunned: why didn’t ornithologists know aboutthis? To be fair, the literature wasn’t especially accessible e I had totravel from Oxford to Roslin near Edinburgh where there was apoultry research group simply to look through their library’s jour-nals. That was the beginning of some productive collaborationwith poultry researchers e notably Graham Wishart whom PeterLake suggested I contact. Lake had been instrumental in discoveringthe anatomical basis of sperm storage and had introduced theconcept of a ‘fertile period’ in birds (Lake,1975; see Birkhead, 2008).

My fascination with the mechanisms of sperm competitiondrew me away from explicitly behavioural research. Mechanismshad a greater allure because the predictions seemed moreamenable to rigorous experimental testing. It was a good decision:the question of why females engage in extrapair copulation hascontinued to elude behavioural ecologists. However, I retained astrong interest in behaviour through my research students, almostall of whom preferred being in the field studying behaviour, ratherthan being in the lab trying to understand the anatomy and physi-ology of sperm competition, or worse, doingmolecular work. Thosewere heady days for me: there were plenty of studentships andhigh-quality students, and sperm competition generated an abun-dance of exciting field-based projects. The mid 1980se1990s wasalso a time when supervising research students involved little bu-reaucracy and my philosophy was to give them (almost) as muchfreedom as they wanted and they usually published on their own.This doesn’t mean that like earlier generations (e.g. Parker, 2006)they were ignored for 3 years e I tried to provide what I considereduseful training, and I hope, in a nonintrusive way. The subsequentgovernment-imposed cancer of performance indicators and theratchet of research assessment exercises put paid to all of thatand I made a conscious decision to train fewer research students.I continue to be amazed and encouraged that academics continueto conduct good research in spite of, not because of, these intellec-tually stultifying management devices.

When academics reflect on their careers they often comment onthe cleverness of their research students and postdocs; for me thefact that most of themwere also exceptionally nice people has beena vital part of my enjoyment of science. Our lab field trips, whichincluded visits to Minsmere in Suffolk, the north Norfolk coastwhere we met up with birder Mark Cocker and writer RichardMabey, and Northumberland and the Farne Islands, were particu-larly enjoyable and played an important role in lab cohesion.

Type A

What has guided me? First and foremost a love for, and an insa-tiable appetite to understand, the naturalworld. I enjoy being outsideand looking atbirds. Second,with thebenefit ofhindsighte and this abit embarrassinge I think my reluctance both at home and at schoolto accept authority, and hence being prepared to challenge acceptedwisdom,andnot take ‘no’ for ananswerhelpedmakemea researcher.Third, physiology.Havingbeenborna typeA, that is, somewhat impa-tient and quick to respond to a challenge, has certainly helped in sci-ence but not always in other aspects of life. Related to this, I seem toneed only a few hours’ sleep and I’m keen to jump out of bed in themorning. I used to teach a field course in Pembrokeshire with acolleaguewho claimed to function properly only if they got 10 hourssleep a night. Over a 40-year career that means that I will haveenjoyed around 90 000 hours e that’s 10 years e more fun thanthey have. Fourth, I wasmotivated by a small number of inspirationaland charismatic teachers whomademe recognize that being an aca-demic means being both a researcher and an effective teacher. Icurrently teach animal behaviour to first-year students, where myaim is to inspire them rather than fill their head with facts. Teachinganimal behaviour is a privilege: I use John Alcock’s book (now in its10th edition) which students find particularly attractive, and ‘Krebs& Davies’ now moulted into its new plumage: Davies, Krebs, andWest (2012) An introduction to behavioural ecology.

Cuckoo

In the 1970s it wasn’t unusual to go straight from a Ph.D. to afull-time academic position, but getting a lectureship at the Univer-sity of Sheffield in 1976 at the tender age of 26 forcedme to grow uprather quickly. The Zoology Department in Sheffield was tiny e justeight academics e and run by a ferocious, autocratic and often-inebriated head of department who thought that an undergraduatedegree in zoology could be taught using staff trained only as endo-crinologists. He resented me from the start, having hoped toappoint one of his own academic offspring. Sheffield was a revela-tion, and I realized that for the previous 3 years nestled among Ox-ford’s dreamy spires I’d been protected from the real world.

Once at tea in my early days at Sheffield, I used the word ‘hy-pothesis’ and was told very firmly that hypotheses had no placein (endocrinological) science: my colleagues’ approach was epito-mized by ‘first find an effect . then figure out what’s going on’.On another occasion I was introduced to a senior member of staffwhose main claim to fame seemed to have been in using a t testin his (endocrinology) paper. It was hard, but it wasn’t all bad,and several of the staff became good friends. John Messenger, acephalopod biologist, gave the few lectures on animal behaviour.He had been taught by, and was still devoted to, the legendary J.Z. Young, so his teaching of animal behaviour was brain orientedand evolution-free; but the students loved John’s charming cepha-lopod manner and cephalopod-inspired lectures. Len Hill, an insectendocrinologist and who for decades effectively ran the depart-ment, inspired me by his undergraduate course in the history andphilosophy of science, which I continued after he retired.

My arrival in Sheffield coincidedwith the last few years of what Ithink of as the History Man era (if you don’t know what this is readMalcolm Bradbury’s (1975) book of the same name). Academia thenwas liberal, carefree and unbureaucratized and the department wasfull of eccentrics: academics, secretaries and technicians. It was funbut far from perfect, especially for a cuckoo like myself. There werefew grants and the annual allocation of research funds was deliv-ered directly into the hands of the head of department who, asfar as I could see, kept most of it, dispensing the little that wasleft to his cronies. There was no democracy: it was nepotistic and

Invited Contributions / Animal Behaviour 91 (2014) vexviii

cheerfully inefficient, but overall, no worse than the bureaucrati-cally dominated system we now work in.

My own History Man days were virtually nonexistent: I caughtjust a glimpse of their postorgasmic glow and watched as theyexpired and became part of history themselves. I arrived in Shef-field within a few years of opposition MP Shirley Williams havingpublished an article in The Times with the chilling title: ‘For scien-tists the party’s over’ (Williams, 1971). She was correct, and notonly did university funding begin to decline, it was followed by aburgeoning bureaucracy and a massive and under-resourced risein student numbers. I kept my head down, did my teaching andgot on with my research: seabirds in the Canadian Arctic and mag-pies, Pica pica, in a little valley to the west of the university, where,unlike the university, nothing much seemed to have changed sincethe middle ages.

ASAB and BoS

In 1981 I was invited to serve on ASAB Council. Somewhatdaunted and with no idea of what to expect, I went to my firstmeeting which was in the meetings rooms at the Zoo in Londonand was pleasantly surprised by its relaxed atmosphere. But thenI was told that the role of the newest member on Council was toorganize an Easter meeting. My heart sank: I felt duped, but PatBateson, who was then President, gently steamrollered my queru-lous objections. Contrary to expectations, organizing the confer-ence was great; I loved it and the meeting seemed to go well.Joining ASAB Council was the beginning of a long relationshipwith the society.

The experience of running the ASAB meeting and my affectionfor the EGI conferences (which I continued to attend) inspired meto try my own small conference in 1990. The aim was to gathertogether a diverse group of open-minded reproductive biologistswho could share techniques and generate some new ideas. Forwant of a better name, I called it the Biology of Spermatozoa (BoS)meeting, because at that timemost behavioural ecology (and other)research on reproduction was male oriented. This wasn’t becauseresearchers were sexist, although many were; it was largelybecause theory e generated largely by Geoff Parker e predictedthat sexual selection operated more intensively on males than fe-males, and also because males were much easier to study than fe-males (Parker & Birkhead, 2013). Anyway, the name stuck, eventhough in subsequent meetings we also covered female aspects ofreproduction. The first BoS meeting took place in a small depart-mental lecture theatre in the University of Sheffield on a singleday in 1991. My colleague Harry Moore, also at Sheffield, whosemore clinical view of sperm biology complemented my own, wasa co-organiser. We invited behavioural ecologists, andrologists,agricultural zoologists, theoreticians and medics (some of whomhad never heard of sperm competition and knew little about evolu-tion). The format was simple: short talks and plenty of time for dis-cussion. It was a success: everyone enjoyed the widely differingperspectives and I think we all recognized how much we couldlearn from each other.

A year later Harry and I organized the second meeting afterwhich BoS became a biennial event: the most recent meeting wasin September 2013 and the next is in September 2015 (http://www.sheffield.ac.uk/aps/staff-and-students/acadstaff/bosconference). Wewere lucky in finding awonderful venuewherewe could all stay, deep in the Peak District National Park: LosehillHall. This was the perfect location for a small meeting withcomfortable rooms, log fires, an excellent bar, abundant food andwonderful staff. The successive conferences at Losehill Hall mademe realize how important a venue is for the success of a meeting:something that universities who lease their halls of residence for

vacation meetings seem to be blissfully unaware of. The emphasisat BoS was on informal discussion, with plenty of time to chat: afterthe talks, after supper, late into the night and on the walk e rain orshine e to the top of Mam Tor.

The atmosphere was electric. Harry and I tried, not always suc-cessfully, to get people to talk about their unpublished work or re-sults they didn’t understand. Over the years a community began tobuild, with a number of regulars including Geoff Parker, Scott Pit-nick, Nina Wedell, Bob Montgomerie, Dave Hosken and the latePaul Ward, as well as a constant flow of younger researchers. Asthe community grew and people got to know each other, so did asense of trust, encouraging researchers to collaborate and to talkabout their ongoing work without (much) fear of having their ideasstolen.

It was only after the BoS meetings had been running for severalyears that I learned that there had been a series of meetings in the1930s with a very similar ethos, the ‘West Coast SexMeetings’ orga-nized by Frank Beach, RichardWhalen andWilliam Young for thoseinterested in brains, hormones and behaviour (Birkhead et al.,2014). The Gordon Meetings (http://www.grc.org/) have a similarformat.

The essential ingredients for an effective meeting? No morethan 60 participants; a mix of gender, age and expertise; a comfort-able, attractive venue with good food and drink; a flexible not-too-busy programme; and above all, a group of enthusiastic delegates.

Teaching

As a D.Phil. student I volunteered to act as a demonstrator on acourse entitled ‘Zoology for Geologists’ taught by Tom Kemp whowas based at the University Museum. I cannot remember quitehow it came about, but I ended up designing and running the prac-tical classes associatedwith the course for a group of around 14 stu-dents. Tom made a cameo appearance every so often, but I wasessentially left to my own devices and had a free hand to orderwhatever live animals I considered appropriate. It seems almost un-believable now, but I once ordered a king crab, Limulus, from theU.S. and when it arrived I was rather intimidated by its enormoussize and massive spiky ‘tail’. I’d never seen a live one before, and Ihad no idea whether it was safe to handle. Luckily, that year theclass included the middle-aged wife of a visiting American profes-sorwho, on seeingme dither, stepped forward and plucked the crabfrom its tank flipping it over to expose its complex underparts tothe somewhat startled undergraduates.

Those classes, inwhich I had seemingly limitless resources and asmall group of enthusiastic students, were my teaching apprentice-ship. I thoroughly enjoyed it. On arriving in Sheffield there was somuch that wasn’t taught, including behavioural ecology, ecology,evolution and statistics, it was hard to know where to start. Overthe next few years I taught all of those subjects, but as the depart-ment grew and we employed more whole animal biologists, I wasable to focus on the two areas I liked best, teaching animal behav-iour to first-year students and history and philosophy of science(aka ‘doing science’) to third-year undergraduates.

Teaching animal behaviour is a joy, not least because many stu-dents have a natural interest in it. In addition, it is much easier toenthuse undergraduates about animal behaviour than it is abouttopics such as molecular biology or photosynthesis, which my col-leagues have to deal with. However, animal behaviour can bedeceptive: it may look easy, but it requires an understanding of con-cepts, as well as learning and regurgitating facts, and it can(depending on the quality of the students) be hard to teach effec-tively. Each year, as my behaviour course rolls around again, Icontinue to be sympathetically amazed by how hard some

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first-year students find it to grasp the difference between proxi-mate and ultimate factors, and between Tinbergen’s four questions.

I like teaching animal behaviour because of my own neotenousstate. I’ve never grown out of my childhood love of watching ani-mals, and I enjoy sharing that with undergraduates. Although mymolecular or photosynthetic colleagues sometimes wax lyricalabout their subjects, their enthusiasm doesn’t usually stem froma childhood love of nature. Interestingly, of course, any interestthat undergraduates show for animal behaviour no longer stemsfrom a childhood love of nature either, since few have collectedeggs, beetles, butterflies, or watched birds in their youth. Most ofmy older behavioural ecology colleagues started this way, but todaythere are too many fears and distractions for children to be let loosein the natural world. Reassuringly though, something like catch-upgrowth occurs among undergraduates who on discovering thewonders of animal behaviour start to develop into field naturalists.

A surprising number of academics, andmany of thosewith pres-tigious postdoctoral fellowships decry and despise teaching, whichI find disappointing. I was especially disheartened by E.O. Wilson(once my hero), advocating in his Letters to a young scientist(2013) to avoid teaching at all costs. This is irresponsible, self-indulgent, shortsighted advice. For me, being an academic meansbeing a teacher as well as a researcher. Most of us are in our privi-leged positions precisely because we were inspired by great teach-ers and I see no reason why we should not reciprocate. I’m alsoconvinced that teaching and research feed off and reinforce eachother.

Communication in a changing landscape

To those who aren’t part of it, the academic landscape appearsunchanging: academics conduct research and teach. But of courseover the last 50 years the academy has altered almost beyondrecognition. The History Man days are long gone, and with itmuch academic freedom. Instead, we are now monitored andperformance-managed, and we risk being locked into an Escher-like perpetual contract-seeking cycle. Some of the most dramaticchanges have occurred quite recently, including widening accessand an increased number of undergraduates needing to be taught,the introduction of tuition fees (U.K., except Scotland), and the needto piggy-back real research on the back of government-approvedresearch. The secret to success, however, is not to let the burgeon-ing bureaucracy get to us. My advice is focus on your research andteaching which is where the real rewards are.

Interestingly, the recession has forced us to recognize that uni-versities must better justify their existence by informing the publicabout what they do and why it is important. Outreach, once a dirtyword for some academics, now represents a wonderful opportu-nity, especially with a topic like animal behaviour. Without animalbehaviour researchers there would no quality wildlife TV program-ming, and it is easy to justify animal behaviour and other blue skiesresearch, for example, by telling the public about our own research.Talking to the public, teaching undergraduates and even writingpopular science are all part of the same thing: communication. Asstudents of animal behaviour we should excel at it.

Unknowns

What developments in animal behaviour would I like to see?First and foremost, and perhaps I am naïve here, I would like tosee more honesty e not just in animal behaviour, but in other areasof science too.

Honesty has been a major casualty of the increased competitionfor funds and the assessment and accountability culture ofacademia. When Bob Montgomerie and I starting writing our

‘Beginner’s guide to scientific misconduct’ (Montgomerie &Birkhead, 2005) while we were at the Animal Behavior Society(ABS) meeting in Oaxaca, Mexico in 2004, we predicted that themore difficult funding is to obtain, the more misconduct we wouldsee. Sadly, that has turned out to be true and Fang, Steen, andCasadevall (2012) estimate there to have been a 10-fold increasein scientific fraud between 1975 and 2012. Dishonesty may beencouraged by the fact that a single paper in a vanity journal erather like a single appearance in Hello magazine e can determinesomeone’s career. One form of scientific misconduct is extremehype or rhetoric e overselling one’s results. The results of scientificendeavour are rarely clear cut, especially in the field of animalbehaviour, yet there’s a tendency to write them up as thoughthey are. Rather than hype, I’d much rather see an honest paperthat says: ‘this isn’t the complete answer, but it is the best anyonehas done so far’. Peter Medawar (1963) made a similar point aboutthe ‘dishonest’ way many scientific papers are written whichimplied that the researcher started with an hypothesis and thenproceeded in an orderly, linear manner to reach ‘the truth’. Howoften does that really happen? Blatant dishonesty, unnecessaryhype and even falsely reporting the way a study is conducted allresult in a huge amount of wasted effort.

What of the future? Even if we were to find ourselves withoutmajor funding it would still be possible to study animal behaviour.As the pioneer of bird watching Edmund Selous said in 1901, all youneed is a pair of binoculars and a notebook (Selous, 1901): he wasright and it is still true. Of course, there will be technological devel-opments that depend on abundant funding and we should be readyto exploit those opportunities when they arise. The really excitingdevelopment is that animal behaviour is moving into areas thatTinbergen (1951) in his Study of instinct considered out of bounds,including cognition, personality and emotions. Tinbergen felt thatthese topics were either too difficult, too vulnerable to anthropo-morphism or too close to what animal psychologists were doing,and suggested that ethologists avoid them. It is a true measure ofhowmuch our field hasmatured, that we nowconsider these topicsa mainstream part of animal behaviour. The other thing I find exhil-arating is the fact that through a combination of effective under-graduate teaching and ASAB and ABS conferences we continue toinspire successive generations of animal behaviour students.

Acknowledgments

I thank Ana Sendova-Franks, Len Hill, Kate Lessells, Bob Mont-gomerie and an anonymous referee for valuable comments on themanuscript.

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Tim R. BirkheadDepartment of Animal & Plant Sciences, University of Sheffield,

Alfred Denny Building, Western Bank,Sheffield S10 2TN, U.K.

E-mail address: t.r.birkhead@sheffield.ac.uk.

Available online 3 April 2014