Endler, John A. (2025) What should we be doing as behavioural ecologists? Behavioral Ecology, 36 (3). araf029.

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Abstract

It is worthwhile to consider what we are doing as Behavioural Ecolgists. Tinbergen and others did an excellent job of focusing the field and its methods, but it is valuable to consider what aspects of our subject need more development. In order to answer questions about Behavioural Ecology and advance the field, we must try to observe and understand as much as we can of organism-organism and organism-environment interactions and their history. We need to put Ecology back into Behavioural Ecology: we need to make a lot more use of Natural History. Natural History is the ultimate source of all hypotheses, so neglecting it could result in stagnation of our field. We need to think more about the origin of good questions and testable hypotheses; good science is not just a matter of hypothesis design but also how we generate the hypotheses in the first instance.

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