For more details and registration, please email Tatum Chan at chan.tatum@cityu.edu.hk.
Abstract:
The quote in my title comes from an interviewee speaking about humans encountering free-ranging cattle in Hong Kong. The inevitability of human-wildlife interactions is a universal even when describing such a diversity of experiences and behaviours. The research in my group analyses these interactions using tools from behavioural ecology to conservation science. In this talk, I will address some of our core studies. First, social behaviour of African Savannah elephants (Loxodonta Africana), focusing on temporal relationships between males, and communication, specifically the variation in rumbles in elephants that occupy an area connected to a National Park, which relies on both tourism and trophy hunting for funding. Next, I will introduce our ongoing work on olfaction, choices and human-animal interactions in Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) and how it can contribute to captive welfare and management. Finally, I’ll pivot from elephants to our studies in Hong Kong. We have approached wild boar (Sus scrofa) interactions with humans from a social science perspective first and I’ll present results on the framing of “human-wild boar conflict”, including the identity and role of quoted speakers in news reports. I’ll also present findings from our questionnaires about feeding of wild boar. Finally I’ll introduce work in progress on free ranging cattle (Bos taurus) in Mui Tsz Lam and use of wildlife products in traditional Chinese medicine.
Biography:
Hannah Mumby is an Assistant Professor in the School for Biological Science and Department of Politics and Public Administration, University of Hong Kong. She leads the Applied Behavioural Ecology and Conservation Lab, where a vibrant and international group research behaviourial ecology, human-wildlife interactions and conservation science, with a focus on the right methods for the pressing questions. Before taking up that position, she was based at the Department of Zoology at the University of Cambridge, where she was a Branco Weiss Society in Science Fellow and Drapers' Company Fellow at Pembroke College, where she wrote her first popular monograph, Elephants: birth, death and family in the lives of giants with HarperCollins in (2020). In 2018 she was a College for Life Sciences Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin and in 2017, she was Fulbright Scholar at Colorado State University. She is an Honorary Fellow at the Centre for African Ecology at the University of Witwatersrand in. She was a Leverhulme Trust funded post-doc at the University of Sheffield, where she also conducted her PhD (2014) on the association between life history and environment in Asian elephants under Virpi Lummaa. She did her undergraduate and master's degrees at the University of Cambridge. In 2020, she was awarded the Christopher Barnard Award for new investigator by the Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour.