David Lentink: Researches the movement of animals, mainly flying.
“I am interested in the movement of animals. I mainly focus on flying, but in my field, we study how animals run, swim, and move. This is because we know very little about it. Understanding this has significant biological value. You can offer various solutions to the world just by understanding how nature works. That is my greatest interest. But it is also very important from the perspective of animal welfare. What is the behavior, and how can an animal move well? It is also very important for other areas within biology, such as ecology, evolutionary biology, or developmental biology. Movement is a fundamental aspect of how organisms live on Earth. It is how they gather food, find partners, reproduce, and migrate, so it is truly an essential biological requirement.
My interest is to research movement in a natural way because I think that if an animal behaves naturally, I learn the most about how it usually moves. That is why this is one of my main focuses in my research. I let them search for food in a motivating way and train them with clicker training, which is also used in dog training. When I research an animal, film birds, and want a bird to fly from A to B so I can see the movement, it works very well if the animal itself wants to fly to the other side and is motivated to do so beforehand.
I conduct research on experimental animals, but I do not perform animal experiments. We only observe the animals. Regarding reduction, I always work with as few animals as possible, with 5 large birds in the past. That is not many. This means that I cannot answer certain questions. So one of the consequences of refinement is that I cannot show smaller effects. Therefore, I focus on questions where I need to research as few experimental animals as possible. This also means that I cannot answer certain questions that I might think should be answered. That is a choice, which does not mean it is always the right choice.”