Ep60 Gordon Bauer on care, training, research, and conservation of manatees and other animals, as well as interspecies play between a manatee and a turtle

Today on iBuzz we welcome Dr Gordon Bauer, Professor Emeritus of Psychology at New College of Florida. Gordon has investigated animal senses, cognition and behaviour in a wide variety of species such as manatees, bottlenose dolphins, humpback whales and sea turtles.

Gordon opens with one of his first interactions with humpback whales and explains how he became interested in studying animals at a young age with frequent trips to his local zoo. He reflects on how he explored a number of possible career paths before returning to work with animals at the age of 30, a decade after graduating from his B.A. in Psychology.

He describes his work at the University of Hawaii, working in dolphin communication and cognition. He talks about how collaboration with researchers from other fields allowed him to pursue biomagnetism in species including bottlenose dolphins, porpoises and humpback whales. This culminated in his first published article, kickstarting his ongoing and influential career in cetacean research.

Dr Bauer goes on to share his experiences working in the field of conservation with free-living manatees. He explains how it began as a project with one of his students, which aimed to discover whether manatees could be trained to comply with husbandry procedures. What began as a student project eventually grew into a larger initiative, including research into manatees that are struck by boats and how they use their senses to understand their surroundings. It is highlighted that by understanding how manatees experience their world, it will be possible to understand how better to care for and protect these animals in our care and in the wild.

Gordon shares his experiences with training animals, and how training does not always go to plan. He describes an experience of training manatees to open an eye on signal, and hold it open for a veterinary ophthalmologist to examine; he recalls how, after several months of training, it had turned out that the manatees had instead learned to close their eyes and keep them closed. He highlights the importance of understanding how animals behave in creating effective training results; for example, if he had understood that manatees close their eyes when eating, he might have adjusted the reward protocol.

“We had this naive trainer, who had made this major breakthrough with the manatee … the discovery that auditory stimulation kept them relaxed and on their backs.”

Following on from discussing his own research career, he goes on to reflect on the research work carried out by his own students. This included work on lateralisation in marine mammals, indicating that different individual manatees would have different flipper preferences much like how humans will have a preference for a left or right dominant hand. Gordon stresses the importance of communicating the findings of research to a variety of audiences to ensure science can be put into practice.

Gordon continues with a discussion on animal cognition and acknowledging the learning principles and complex processes that animals display during research. He cites the importance of understanding how the marine environment shapes cognition in marine mammals as we move forward in investigating specific questions for specific species.

We finish with a story about care, and of people engaging with species that are not typically seen as playful - such as sea turtles - and watching animals having fun.

Publications by Gordon Bauer HERE

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