In the mid-20th century, Niko Tinbergen, a Nobel Prize laureate for his research on individual and social behaviour, conducted a famous experiment to study herring gulls, Larus argentatus, where he used wooden gull heads to study chick feeding behaviour (Tinbergen, 1948). By presenting the chicks with an artificial gull beak, he showed that the chicks would peck at the red spot on the artificial beak, just as they did at the red patch on the lower mandible of their parent's yellow beak. By using a replica of the gull beak, Tinbergen could demonstrate the specific stimuli that triggered the chicks' innate pecking behaviour. This experiment com- bined living biological components with artificial elements. Today, with the rapid development of engineered technologies, we are seeing a growth in biohybrid approaches, where living and engineered components are combined, for research in animal behaviour (see Table 1 for a glossary of terms). More and more researchers are developing such systems to explore and advance the field, building on the legacy of Tinbergen's foundational work. This review article introduces a Special Issue on this topic and is the result of an interdisciplinary workshop that took place at Swansea University, U.K., in autumn 2023, supported by the Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour (ASAB).