researchers interested in discovering candidate genes that are
important predictors of behavioural phenotypes. Precise techniques
can then be used to knockout or knockdown these candidates
and thus manipulate behaviour (Wong & Hofmann, 2010). For
a behavioural ecologist, the utility of a candidate gene approach
may be limited for reasons discussed above: behaviour is often
regulated by multiple genes of small effect, and genetic knockdowns
and knock-outs can be difficult to apply to nonmodel systems,
although this is changing with improvements in methodology,
especially RNA interference