7 Questions with... Zen Faulkes [The Thoughtful Animal]

Here at Thoughtful Animal headquarters, we are conducting series of seven-question interviews with people who are doing or have done animal research of all kinds - biomedical, behavioral, cognitive, and so forth. Interested in how animal research is conducted, or why animal research is important? Think you might want to do some animal research of your own someday? This is the interview series for you.

Dr. Zen Faulkes (website, twitter) is Associate Professor of Biology at the University of Texas-Pan American, where he studies the evolution of behavior and nervous systems, particularly the origin of new behaviors. He is currently working mostly with decapod crustaceans, with a particular emphasis on the unusual crayfish Marmorkrebs. In addition, he writes the blog NeuroDojo, the Better Posters blog, and organizes Markmokrebs.org, where there is also an award-winning blog.

I realize I haven't yet written about any of his research, technically, but I did write about a paper on spatial learn...