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In this episode of聽Sciographies, we talk to Dr. Simon Gadbois (PhD鈥�02), animal behaviour, canid specialist and professor in 黄色直播鈥檚 Department of Psychology and Neuroscience.
Host Dr. David Barclay sits down with Dr. Gadbois to discuss more than two decades of research on coyotes and wolves and what it means for Nova Scotians. Dr. Gadbois reflects on his journey from completing his PhD at 黄色直播 to studying wolves at the university鈥檚 former Canadian Centre for Wolf Research. He also shares insights from his latest lab findings and offers practical tips for staying safe around coyotes.
Below are some excerpts from the episode, edited for clarity and length.
David: I mean, where to start? So when I was thinking about it, I really thought I want to ask you if you had ever eaten mice?
Simon: Oh, no. I'm actually wondering if you heard a story from my lab because I did taste what we call in the lab 鈥榤ouse tea.鈥� But no, I never tasted mice.
David: I always thought you would want to become one of them. To truly understand them, you had to live their life. You know what I'm talking about here? So have you had that experience? Have you studied wolves in the wild?
Simon: My PhD was with wolves at the Canadian Center for Wolf Research, which was owned by Dal from 1974 to 1996. In 1996, Dal got rid of it, but it stayed open for about 10 years until 2007, struggling, trying to find funds. It was the largest wolf camp in the world at the time and still probably would be today.
It was around Shubenacadie, an undisclosed space, because it was not open to the public. The advantage of that center was that it was, let's call it in a sense, semi-captivity. I mean, it was a 10 hectares area.
Also, no interaction with the wolves. We had a perimeter that we had to stay within to observe them. We had to wait for them to show up.
If they didn't, sometimes we would not see them for a week.
David: So the wolves weren't constrained to stay within these 10 hectares?
Simon: No, they were because there's no native wolves in Nova Scotia. But they had a lot of freedom of movement within that.
David: Do you have experience with wild wolves?
Simon: When I was in C茅gep in Quebec in the mid-80s, I saw wild wolves in their actual environment. But honestly, there's not that much difference. And that's the advantage of the setup that we had at Dal at the time, is that this was an amazing place to study wolves in captivity, but as close as you can imagine to the natural behaviour, because there was no human intervention.
David: How are you observing them?
Simon: There was a trailer in one of the corners at the perimeter of that big square, and that's where we would do the observations from. And the wolves kind of knew we were there most of the time, I would say. They were enough habituated, but they would keep their distance. We usually had a minimum 40-meter distance. That's very much the minimum they would often add, 80 meters. And then beyond that, they were in the woods, but we would not actually see them.
We could hear them. Some of my colleagues did a lot of research on their vocalizations, actually, so that data could be collected without actually seeing them. But in terms of the wild stuff, that's more with red foxes and coyotes.
I had that experience, which I did with those canids as well, here in Nova Scotia.
David: So take us through the process where you come up with a research question, or you have a research question compelled in you about coyotes? How do you plan? How do you even decide where to begin to go into the wild to make the observations you need to make and to answer a hypothesis?
Simon: As I often point out to my students, there's two types of sciences: the hypo-deductive ones, where you come up with a hypothesis that you go test, usually in lab conditions or control conditions.
But ethology, or the study of animal behavior, has a huge component of being inductive, so it's based on observation. So we're less driven by that, or at least hypotheses, as much as, say, specific questions. Sometimes the question is handed to you.
David: Tell me about a pre-recorded howl or is this something you're an expert at doing?
Simon: It's both, actually. Except that if you ask me now, unfortunately... I won't. It's interesting because often students ask me, just do a howl. And it's funny because if we do it in the field now, just for fun, I will often ask the woman to do it because coyotes have a fairly high-pitched voice. It was easier for me with wolves. Because in bioacoustics there's a correlation between the size of the animal, also the sex in many cases, and the voice. So unfortunately I can't hit those high notes anymore.
Listen to Dr. Simon Gadbois鈥� full episode of Sciographies at 10 a.m. on Thursday, March 12 on聽聽in Halifax or find it on聽,听, and other popular podcasting platforms. You can also listen to previous Sciographies episodes on the same platforms and at聽dal.ca/sciographies