My daily life is filled with unraveling the mysteries of animal behaviour. My main interest lies in understanding the group- and population-level consequences of behavioral heterogeneity, especially of wildlife. Hereby, I focus on concepts such as animal personality, social networks, foraging, communication, migration, and learning. Study models include (but are not restricted to): waterfowl, songbirds, bats, and fish.

For a complete overview, you can visit my personal website. WUR students can check out possible thesis and internship projects with me at tip.wur.nl.

You can contact me by email at lysanne.snijders AT wur.nl.

Currently, my core research focuses on the Trinidadian guppy system, in which I study the link between social behavior and foraging success in the wild (see video). By studying animal behavior in the wild, I maximize the ecological-relevance of my findings. Often such field experiments come at the cost of experimental rigor, especially when studying vertebrates. Due to their small size and their naturally plastic spatial and social life, Trinidadian guppies offer the best of both worlds. We can thus causally test social factors (such as group size and group composition) by conducting group-level manipulations and we can disentangle effects of the immediate environment by doing translocations, all without trading off ecological relevance.

I am passionate about exploring the various ways that behavioral ecology can contribute to wildlife conservation. At the moment, I am mapping the evidence for the effectiveness of animal conditioning interventions in reducing Human-Wildlife Conflict, in collaboration with WWF-Netherlands (see our peer-reviewed protocol). I also plan to conduct systematic reviews on subsets of the evidence in the map. Systematic evidence synthesis does not only have the potential to contribute to policy and management decisions, but it also facilitates a more thorough and comprehensive understanding of animal behavior principles.

Besides studying animal behaviour, I wish to inspire people with facts and stories about the amazing ways animals behave. In 2016, I very much enjoyed being a lecturer for our Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on animal behaviour, free to participate for everyone. As a female scientist, I also think it is important to set an example for girls all over the world. Science is not just a boy thing.

Currently available student project topics:

Effectiveness of animal conditioning interventions in mitigating Human-Wildlife conflicts

Type: Systematic literature review
Topic: We did a comprehensive search for publications potentially containing evidence on the effectiveness of animal conditioning interventions in reducing Human-wildlife conflicts. The next steps are to screen the studies for relevance and extract the relevant data, with the goal of making this evidence easily available for conservation practitioners and to conduct analyses on potentially key mediating factors of effectiveness in particular taxa.
Level: MSc
Requirements: Interest and ability to work systematically and motivated to sort through large sets of publications.
Start date: Flexible

Recommended reading:
Shivik et al 2003. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1523-1739.2003.00062.x.
Berger-Tal et al 2019. https://doi.org/10.1093/beheco/ary130.
Snijders et al 2019. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13750-019-0153-7.
Domjan 2005. The Essentials of Conditioning and Learning.

Social foraging in guppies (Poecilia reticulata)

Type: Video analysis
Topic: For several years we have conducted social foraging experiments with individually-marked guppies in Trinidad and collected video data. The most recent field season was cut short by the Corona crisis but we were still able to collect videos for three different populations that still need to be analysed. From previous years we have already analysed videos available from a fourth population (under different experimental set-ups). Possible projects involve population comparisons in food detection and consumption or to investigate more detailed social foraging mechanisms (across populations).
Level: MSc or BSc possible
Requirements: Motivation to score behaviour from videos; Experience with or willingness to learn R
Start date: Flexible

Recommended reading:
Snijders et al 2018. https://doi.org/10.1101/260604.
Snijders et al 2019. https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2656.13086.
Chouinard-Thuly & Reader 2019. https://doi.org/10.1101/786772.
Hasenjager & Dugatkin 2017. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2017.2020.