Studying zoology comes with one major issue: the animals. Much as I love them, they never do what you want them to when you want them to. It makes everything about twice as hard, as demonstrated by my experiences over the last couple of weeks.
It all started when me and some friends decided to make a video explaining salmon jumping behaviour for a uni project. Salmon migrate from the Atlantic ocean up freshwater rivers to spawn. Their young are born at these spawning sites and then increase in size, before migrating down the river and back into the sea. This requires a lot of physiological adaptations to cope with the change from fresh to salt water, as well as impressive abilities to trace their steps back to the exact part of the river in which they were born when it is time for them to spawn.
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| Definitely no salmon here! |
However, we were focusing on only a tiny part of this huge journey; overcoming obstacles which block the path to the spawning grounds. There is a waterfall in a nearby town which salmon have to leap up on their way upstream. Eager to impress, we set off at 6.15am one morning (which is dedication considering 10am is generally seen as an early lecture), full of excitement at the prospect of capturing this on video.
We did not see a single fish that day. In fact, we could barely see the waterfall they were meant to jump up, because the bridge was closed. After feeling utterly dejected at our failure, and consoling ourselves with frozen yoghurt, we regrouped and set off the next day in search of crabs.
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| Past Aberdeen harbour the shoreline is rugged and the sea rough |
After gazing into rock pools for half an hour and occasionally moving rocks with our feet, we admitted maybe searching for crabs in Aberdeen in February was a bad idea. We came home with a film of a sea anemone being prodded and some oyster catchers sitting on a rock not doing much.
Getting desperate, we wandered through the local park one sunny lunchtime. And right in front of us was a crow flicking over leaves with its beak, searching for food. This was perfect, an interesting animal showing a behaviour that was easy to explain, which we managed to film!
If you don’t know already, crows are awesome. They are extremely intelligent and can use tools to solve problems and exploit new food sources. In fact it has even been suggested that crows and apes are an example of convergent evolution. This means that they have both been put under similar environmental pressures (for example similar food sources) and have separately evolved the same solution; intelligence.
So that was the final subject of our film! If you want to see the end result of all this hard work, then click the link below, and try not to cringe….
