Dissertations are a nightmare.
I had 208348384 ideas but my tutors have shot down all of them! My degree is BSc Animal Behaviour and Welfare and I want to work with reptiles so my dissertation is going to be on reptiles, but that is easier said than done!
Some are impractical - such as studying how egg incubation temperatures determine sex. Some are not exactly ethical such as studying how the diet of bearded dragon hatchlings affects tail nip/toe nip occurrences. Others were shot down for not physically using an animal - ie psychological makeup of reptile owners.
My current idea is spatial learning in hatchling corn snakes. My idea is that i would place similarly aged hatchling corn snakes in a brightly lit maze with the snake having to find the unseen hide. I’d run them through the maze about 2x a day, morning and evening as they’re thought to be crepuscular for 4 days. I’d time how long it takes them to reach the hide each attempt and log the number of any mistakes. My theory is that the snakes will find the hide quicker each run and make less mistakes. This does mean using a large number of snakes. Ideally i’d use about 10. This would mean getting 10 corn snakes.
Not a bad side effect of a dissertation i reckon! For science!
