Science Today: Making sense of animals' antics - Who could get tired of their job if it involves the wonders of animal behaviour? asks Emma Napper.

(From The Irish Times)

As jobs go, studying animal behaviour must be one of the strangest and most self-indulgent. Watching animals and finding out why they do what they do has been an obsession of mine for as long as I can remember.

Generations of scientists and natural historians have enjoyed watching the natural world and we now know quite a lot about the types of animal there are on Earth and a bit about the amazing variation in the ways that animals look. However we are just starting to learn about animal behaviour and how it evolves.

Every living organism is driven by a desire to survive long enough to have as many offspring as possible. But animals are not robots following a set of simple …