I am an physiological and behavioural ecologist, with a special interest in threatened megafauna and fishes. The behavioral decisions that animals make dictate whether they survive from day to day and ultimately their reproductive fitness. Generally, these decisions are a product of trade-offs between various competing interests, such as feeding, resting, reproducing, and staying safe. My work focuses on understanding the mechanisms that determine how wild animals weigh up these trade-offs when making behavioural and movement decisions. In particular, much of my work focuses on understanding how changes in energy demands across seasons and life stages and environmental bioenergetic mechanisms (i.e., food supply, energy landscape) determine species habitat use and requirements. To do this, I use state-of-the-art biologging and telemetry tagging tools, combined with comparative physiology laboratory experiments and contemporary behavioural and movement modelling techniques.

As part of the Salmon Watersheds Lab, my work aims to determine the impacts of landslides on salmon migration success and how salmon navigate these and other high velocity flow areas. Other projects I previously and continue to work on aim to understand the factors that determine behavioural plasticity of species, and as such, their capacity to adjust to changing environments. These have included examining the influence of metabolic rate on home range size and movement decisions, environmental factors (e.g., temperature, tide) dictating activity and foraging patterns, and links between animal personality and individual behavioral variation.

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Interested in my work or collaborating, feel free to reach me via email (evan_byrnes@sfu.ca) or twitter (@FishyBehaviour).

My work can be viewed on Google Scholar.