do you work alone or in a team? – Animal Behaviour Zone

Question: do you work alone or in a team?
- Keywords:
  team,
  workplace
Asked by sluglife to Carrie, Cedric, Ellen, Ines, Rupert on 5 Mar 2017. This question was also asked by nilpach.
- Ines Goncalves answered on 5 Mar 2017:
  
  A bit of both of I suppose. I am part of a group and we have regular meetings to discuss concepts, experiments, share our findings, but I am the only person in the group working with the cichlids so I will run the experiments alone. This balance allows me to have independence in planning and designing my studies, and in deciding which questions I want to ask, while at the same time I have people around me who I can ask for help if I need to, and of course, people to share my ups and downs with, which is very important.
- Rupert Marshall answered on 5 Mar 2017:
  
  When I am working in the field I am usually trying to record birds singing, or observe their behaviours so I usually work alone. Having extra people around might cause extra disturbance and cause them to fly away. I also need to be sure the animals are behaving naturally, not just doing something because I am there watching them.
  As a scientist, when I’m not actually in the field, I often ask other people for advice on my research or help my students with their research projects. Teaching is definitely teamwork – each degree has classes taught by lots of different people: none of us know everything about everything.
- Ellen Williams answered on 6 Mar 2017:
  
  In terms of my actual project I work ‘alone’, but I do have three fantastic supervisors and a wider range of ‘advisers’ – colleagues from other universities who are happy to bounce ideas around with me when I need to. My best ideas have come out of brain storming sessions. Of course I also can’t keep all of my study elephants in my back yard though so actually I am really lucky in that I work with elephant keepers across all of my study zoos and also elephant researchers from a wide variety of institutions. So whilst my project means I often have to work ‘alone’ it definitely wouldn’t be possible without the support of a whole team of people!
- Carrie Ijichi answered on 6 Mar 2017:
  
  I work alone quite a bit but recently I’ve started doing a lot more work with students. That’s very exciting because, if they’re lucky, they’ll get to publish in a scientific journal as part of their undergraduate degree. We’ve had big 7 people teams working on one behaviour test and little groups with just two as well. You have to be incredibly organised and everyone needs to know what they’re doing but the buzz you get when it all goes smoothly is great.
- Cedric Tan answered on 7 Mar 2017:
  
  I work in a team, I have field guides and a research assistant in the forest. I also have a collaborator in Malaysia. As for my research on games, I have a temporary research assistant. In a team, we get our work done more efficiently as each person knows their roles, e.g. navigate in the field. Also we exchange good ideas, like how to better conduct our experiments.

Question: do you work alone or in a team?

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