ANIMAL behaviour experts have been looking at how their colleagues behave,
and have found that those who study the most colourful animals are also the most
flamboyant.
Jonathan Dale of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole,
Massachusetts, and his colleagues watched 42 presentations at last year’s ABS
meeting at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania. They recorded the number of
times each speaker used a laser pointer to trace shapes on the slide screen
during a 20-minute talk, including wiggles, circles, horizontal and vertical
lines. “It was just a matter of doodling during each talk,” Dale says.
One of the recorders,…
