ABOVE: STRANGE coauthor Mike Webster often works with species of shoaling fish that he captures using traps. To keep from biasing his samples, Webster uses different types of traps and nets to be sure he isn’t only capturing the boldest individuals.
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The world’s oldest behavioral biology journal, Ethology, announced on January 4 that it will be adopting a new experimental design and data reporting framework called STRANGE in an effort to address biases in animal behavior and cognition research. Moving forward, authors submitting manuscripts to the journal will need to evaluate their study animals for possible biases—factors such as genetics, personality differences, or prior experiences in research—and discuss how those facets can influence the study’s findings.
“Everybody knows that there are certain sampling biases that can affect the reproducibility and the generalizability of research findings in animal behavior, but quite often these are not declared,” says Christian Rutz, ...
