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Headshot of Cecile Sarabian

Cecile Sarabian

Research Fellow
Biosciences

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Research Links

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2225-8702
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About

Dr Sarabian is a cognitive ecologist specializing in the evolutionary origins of disgust, focusing on how animals — including humans — avoid parasites and pathogens. Her research also explores how perceptions of risk, such as disease and predation, can be used in wildlife management and conservation. She earned her PhD from Kyoto University and has held postdoctoral positions at Kyoto University, Nagoya University, The University of Hong Kong, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse. Currently, Cecile is a a UKRI/Marie Sklodowska-Curie Research Fellow at Swansea University, working within the SHOAL group. Her project focuses on chacma baboon adaptations to disease and predation and how these can be used in human-wildlife interactions. For more information, please see her website.

Areas Of Expertise

  • Cognitive ecology
  • Animal behaviour
  • Pathogen avoidance
  • Disgust
  • Risk perception
  • Conservation

Languages Spoken

  • French

Career Highlights

Research
  1. Disgust is an adaptive system hypothesized to have evolved to reduce the risk of becoming sick. It is associated with behavioural, cognitive and physiological responses tuned to allow animals to avoid and/or get rid of parasites, pathogens and toxins.
  2. Little is known about the mechanisms and outcomes of disease avoidance in wild animals. Furthermore, given the escalation of negative human-wildlife interactions, the translation of such knowledge into the design of evolutionarily relevant conservation and wildlife management strategies is becoming urgent.
  3. Contemporary methods in animal ecology and related fields, using direct (sensory cues) or indirect (remote sensing technologies and machine learning) means, provide a flexible toolbox for testing and applying disgust at individual and collective levels.
  4. In this review/perspective paper, we provide an empirical framework for testing the adaptive function of disgust and its associated disease avoidance behaviours across species, from the least to the most social, in different habitats. We predict various trade-offs to be at play depending on the social system and ecology of the species.
  5. We propose five contexts in which disgust-related avoidance behaviours could be applied, including endangered species rehabilitation, invasive species, crop-raiding, urban pests and animal tourism.
  6. We highlight some of the perspectives and current challenges of testing disgust in the wild. In particular, we recommend future studies to consider together disease, predation and competition risks. We discuss the ethics associated with disgust experiments in the above contexts. Finally, we promote the creation of a database gathering disease avoidance evidence in animals and its applications.

[Abstract from last paper, Sarabian et al. 2023, JAE] 

Award Highlights Collaborations