You Can Be Anything › All careers › Science & Research
Ethologist
Studies animal behavior in natural environments — why animals act the way they do.
Did you know?
Konrad Lorenz famously had baby greylag geese imprint on him and follow him like a mother, and he shared the 1973 Nobel Prize.
How subjects help
- Biology: Explain how a behaviour like bird song or wolf howling helps an animal survive.
- Psychology: Test how animals learn, like a crow figuring out how to reach food with a stick.
- Mathematics: Record how often animals do each behaviour and compare the numbers across groups.
- Environmental Science: Study how noise, light or habitat loss change the way wild animals behave.
A famous name
Nikolaas Tinbergen: Ethologist who studied animal behaviour in gulls and fish, sharing the 1973 Nobel Prize.
Try it yourself: Watch an animal for ten minutes
- Choose an animal and stay still and quiet so you don't disturb it. Don't touch or chase it.
- Make a tally of what it does: eating, moving, resting, calling, grooming.
- Draw one feature that helps it survive, like a beak shape, legs or colour.
- What was it doing most? What question would you want to answer next time?
Zoologists observe animals patiently, often for hours, recording what they really do rather than what we expect.
Also try: Invent a way to sort leaves.
Known for it in
Austria, UK, Netherlands, USA, Tanzania