Tanya Shoot

Academic Interests

Animal Behaviour

Plant Behaviour

Comparative Cognition

Individual differences/personality in non-human species

Evolution of cognition and individual differences

Perception and decision-making mechanisms

Research Interests

My research is at the intersection of behavioural ecology, evolution, and animal and plant cognition. The main questions I ask revolve around why and how organisms make the decisions they do and how personality, experiences, and environment impact these decisions. This research is both multi-taxa and multi-methods, spanning empirical investigations of nest-building flexibility in zebra finches during my Undergraduate and Masters at Western University, group decision-making in zebrafish and guppies with manipulated personality compositions, and theoretical modelling of the impact of personality in fruit fly populations for my PhD at Wilfrid Laurier University. Most recently, I have had the opportunity to construct a theoretical framework of what studying plant information processing should look like as a postdoc at the University of Alberta, along with designing empirical experiments to test the framework.  I plan to continue this line of research here at CUE and am excited to see how the different branches of plant behaviour compare to what we know about animal behaviour. I am open to supervising student research projects on any combination of these topics and more, so please feel free to email me with your ideas. For colleagues, external and internal feel free to send me an email and we can come up with some creative projects.

Courses Taught

CUE

PSY 319 – Research Designs and Intermediate Statistical Methods in Psychology

U of A

Biology 490 – Methods in Plant Behaviour

Representative Papers and Publications

Refereed Journal Publications

Shoot, T.T., Long, T.A.F., & Miller, N. (2024). Debugging collective digging in Drosophila melanogaster using theoretical models. Ecological Modeling, 494, 110781.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolmodel.2024.110781

Shoot, T.T., Miller, N., & Long, T.A.F. (2024). Plasticity in fruit fly larval feeding clusters to changes in food quality and distribution. Insectes Sociaux. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00040-024-00947-6.

Edwards, S.C., Shoot, T.T., Martin, R.J., Sherry, D.F, & Healy, S.D. (2020). It’s not all about temperature: breeding success also affects nest design, Behavioral Ecology, 31(4). 1065-1072.

Selected Conference Presentations

Shoot, T.T., Nagetegaal, B., Nelson, X., St. Clair, C., Taylor, A., & Cahill, J.F. (2025). “Radicle embodied cognition in plants” Conference on Comparative Cognition (CO3), Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA [Talk]

Shoot, T.T., & Miller, N.Y. (2024) “Lost in space: The cross-species effect of personality composition on maze exploration.” Animal Behaviour Society (ABS), London, Ontario, CA [Talk]

Shoot, T.T., & Miller, N.Y. (2024)“Turning a corner on maze analysis using two species of fish.” Conference on Comparative Cognition (CO3), Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA [Poster]

Shoot, T.T., & Miller, N.Y. (2023) “The Impact of Individual Personality on Group Behavior in Two Species of Fish.” Animal Behaviour Society (ABS), Portland, Oregon, USA [Talk]

Shoot, T.T., Miller, N.Y., & Long, T.A. (2022) “Food quality affects the structure of fruit fly groups when foraging collectively” Conference on Comparative Cognition (CO3), Virtual [Talk]

Shoot, T.T., Long, T.A., & Miller, N.Y. (2021) “The effect of population density on cluster size and timing of collective digging in Drosophila melanogaster: A theoretical approach” Conference on Comparative Cognition (CO3), Virtual [Talk]

Additional information

Professional website: tanyashoot.com

ORCID: https://orcid.org/my-orcid?orcid=0000-0001-5430-7081