Animal Planet

Asian elephants have lived alongside humans for millennia, and still do in parts of the world today. I study the close relationship between humans and timber elephants in Myanmar, where each elephant is assigned an ‘oozie’ or caretaker when young. This oozie is traditionally a young boy, who learns handling from his father and grows up and trains alongside his elephant in the forest. My talk will describe our work on this unique population, the stability of this traditional life-long relationship in the modern day, and how to interpret various behaviours and vocalisations of these giants.

The talk will focus on the structures that are used by nature to make the myriad of different structural colours found in nature. That is colour not due to pigments or dyes. But instead similar to the effect seen when light is scattered from a cd or a dvd. Light interacts with the small structures on the surface and it is this interaction, which is responsible for the colour. I will talk about our work on bird feathers and butterfly wings and most recently on ultra white beetles. How similar are they? And what can we learn from these structures.

For almost 100 years UK scientists have excelled at carrying out long-term investigations of wild animal populations. These pioneers have collected remarkable details about how long individual animals live, who they mate with, and how they behave. The data have proven invaluable for understanding how evolution by natural selection happens, especially when combined with modern genetics tools. I will describe the above and the important discoveries that have been made.