• Question: Hello! i like your work but what has been the most fun and interesting experiment you have done?

    Asked by danne006 to Claire, Joanna, Suzanne, Kapila on 19 Jun 2013. This question was also asked by tilza72, 010jam35010.
    • Photo: Claire El Mouden

      Claire El Mouden answered on 19 Jun 2013:

      Thanks danne006!

      The most interesting stuff I’m doing right now is thinking how an understanding of how social structures work in the natural world, can help us understand the human world. I’ve not come up with any particular experiments yet though – I’m just talking to people about it!

    • Photo: Suzanne Harvey

      Suzanne Harvey answered on 24 Jun 2013:

      Hi, I’m glad you find our work interesting, thanks!

      Because I work with wild animals, there aren’t many opportunities to do experiments, so when it happens they are one of the best parts of the job! We do ‘playback experiments’ where we use a speaker hidden in the forest to play back baboon vocalisations we’ve recorded to the rest of the group, to see what reaction they give. This is great because it means we can test whether the sounds mean what we think they do. If we play what we think is a warning call and everyone ignores it, we’re probably wrong! If we play a warning call and all of the monkeys run up trees, we’ve probably told them that there’s a predator on the ground.

      This is a really nice experiment and it is how my colleague discovered that diana monkeys have different calls that means ‘eagle’ (when you play it they run down trees and hide on the ground) and ‘leopard’ (when you play it they all run up the trees to hide). I find this kind of thing that shows a kind of language really fascinating!

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