How specific are heritable symbioses?
And what can we learn from swapping obligate symbionts across host species?
We address this in our latest, led by @inespons.bsky.social & in our collaboration w/ @microbiome.bsky.social 🦠🪲 Out today in @natcomms.nature.com!
1/n
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
How do we know our research results are REAL? We replicate them! Most folks agree but lament on how hard it is to publish these replications.
My dearest gentle reader, lament no more! Delighted to unveil: Replication Studies, a new section of Behavioral Ecology 1/
academic.oup.com/beheco/artic...
ABC celebrating International Day of Women and Girls in Science
Let’s celebrate women and girls in science on this International Day of Women and Girls in Science!
UNESCO reports that women represent only 35% of STEM graduates, about 1/3 of researchers worldwide, and just 1/10 STEM leaders.
New paper from our Rwenzori colobus & Sam Stead's dissertation. We examined female glucocorticoids & found a U-shaped distribution with unit size! Females also had increase to parturition & a decrease throughout lactation. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
NEW: North Atlantic right whales - a species whose fortunes I've followed for years - are having a baby boom!!
21 mother-calf pairs have been sighted so far, the highest figure in years. And we're not even halfway through the calving season (which runs to mid-April).
www.wired.com/story/a-nort...
Link to read in full for free: rdcu.be/dI6BS
Illustration of a forest with a sequence of drawings of an orangutan climbing on trees
This is probably my favorite artwork from last year. An older piece, but still one I'm particular fond of.
#sciart #wildlife #mammals #primates #apes #orangutans
🎉🍾 very excited to see this out before 2025 ends doi.org/10.1111/2041... with Will Hoppitt in @methodsinecoevol.bsky.social. This paper is an overview of our new R package STbayes, a user-friendly toolkit for performing Bayesian NBDA analyses. @cbehav.bsky.social @mpi-animalbehav.bsky.social
3-year #PhD student #position open in my group @uniofjyvaskyla.bsky.social Finland on #gut #microbe- host communication in #birds. DL 20.12, start date in April2026. #microbiome #metabolomics #vesicles, please RT
ats.talentadore.com/apply/doctor...
Bridget the cat infiltrates the 'Abbey Road' cover shoot and becomes THE definitive fifth Beatle.
THREAD.
My parents' cat Bridget vanished. As the weeks dragged on they became ever more worried, so to distract himself my dad began to paint Bridget's adventures, imagining her travelling through time and popping up at some of art & music's most important moments.
I've collected his work here...
White: strong fitness costs for young (3-5 yrs, many primiparous), and senescent (11+ yrs) mountain goat ♀️, almost no cost for prime-aged ♀️. Reproduction also reduced by winter snow. No impact of reproduction on ♀️ survival 🧪https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1365-2656.70137
Panel 1. A worm wriggles along watched by a human. It asks: "What are you doing?" Panels 2 to 5. Scientist "I'm studying you. I'm a biologist. Just carry on as if I'm not here." Worm "I feel self-conscious now... What was I doing when you got here?" Scientist "Just wriggling along" Worm "Shall I go back to doing that?" Scientist "I suppose so." Panel 6. The worm is wriggling again. Both the worm and scientist are thinking: "This feels weird now..."
My cartoon for this week’s New Scientist.
p.s. I have a new book of science cartoons: www.tomgauld.com/comic-books-v2
Fig. 1 from the article: Hypothesized bidirectional pathways connecting the gut microbiome and diet in wild birds.
Fig. 2 from the article: Proposed methodology of DNA extraction, PCR, and amplicon sequencing to characterize aspects of avian diet and gut microbiome from the same fecal sample. Researchers can also use the same DNA extract for microbial metagenomics, and they can perform an RNA extraction on the same fecal sample for transcriptomics analysis.
NEW PAPER: how bird diets and gut microbiomes shape each other: synthesizing how diet drives microbiome shifts, how microbes may steer diet choices, and outlining key questions and methods for studying diet–microbiome links.
➡️ vist.ly/4gjuw
#ornithology #birds 🪶
🐒 With or without you? 🤔
📌 A recent study shows how the presence of conspecifics affects the #personality expression of #marmosets. 🤩
#animalbehaviour #primates #sociality #callithrix
🔗 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
I forgot to share that our paper came out a few months ago! We synthesise decades of research showing that conspicuous traits consistently predict attractiveness, condition, and fitness across animals. Check it out if you’re into sexual selection and signalling! doi.org/10.1111/ele....
Nice summary of many years of research on babies' cries by @nicolasmathevon.bsky.social and his team.
"Caring is a skill that is honed through practice, and it physically reshapes the brain of any dedicated caregiver, male or female."
theconversation.com/what-babies-...
Post advertising Dr. Sharon Gursky’s new publication (see post description). Includes a headshot of Dr. Gursky with a Gursky’s Tarsier sitting on her head
Domestic cats are pushing into Indonesia’s Tangkoko Nature Reserve—and hunting Gursky’s tarsier (Tarsius spectrumgurskyae). #Tarsier #Sulawesi #Tangkoko #Conservation #Wildlife #Cats #InvasiveSpecies #Biodiversity #Primate #Research #anthrosky
A very stark reminder why no one goes out on foot after dark in Churchill, Manitoba. This mom and her cubs came just off the beach and behind the town complex. The Polar Bear Alert staff gently herded them away from town to keep everyone safe. #mammals #BearSeason2025 🌿
people are actually very susceptible to just-so stories about human origins because listening to bullshit helped us survive on the savanna
A 🆕 Contribution in the ESA Bulletin: Thinking about grad school? Here are 15 questions that can help you find the right lab fit — and avoid surprises along the way
📄Fifteen Questions to Ask Before Attending Graduate School
doi.org/10.1002/bes2...
Very cool study: matricide in ants as a maniputing behaviour favouring social parasitism! 🤯🤯
->Socially parasitic ant queens chemically induce queen-matricide in host workers. Current Biology. www.cell.com/current-biol...
In 2008, after killing many of their neighbors, Ngogo chimpanzees expanded their territory. Female fertility then doubled, and infant mortality plummeted. Adaptive violence in our ape cousins, documented in this new paper. www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....
📢 rphylopic 📦 1.6.0 is now on #CRAN!
- resolve_phylopic() retries failing API calls 🔄
- geom_phylopic()/add_phylopic() work with ggplot2 4.0.0 🪛
- add_phylopic_tree() wraps add_phylopic() for base R trees
- get_phylopic() can get og source files from #PhyloPic 👤
rphylopic.palaeoverse.org
#Rstats
Super cool work from @btuliozi.bsky.social !! We got to hear from him at lab meeting and I promise this paper is worth your time
A cover for the journal Biology Letters of the Royal Society, displaying a photo of two monk parakeets (birds) preening each other
"Monk parakeets ‘test the waters’ when forming new relationships"
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsbl.2025.0399#d1e770
interesting new study by https://bsky.app/profile/elizabethhobson.bsky.social et al.
J. Manson once reminded me that not […]
[Original post on fediscience.org]
Each dyad (a, b) moves through four discrete states over time, represented by coloured circles. The dyad remains in a given state for a certain duration, or "holding time", before transitioning to a new state according to state-specific transition probabilities, indicated by arrows showing all possible (non-zero) transitions. Paintings by Sofia M. Pereira & Judith von Nordheim.
New paper!
We propose a framework to empirically study animal social relationships by modelling social network (SN) data as time-series—that is, without the need to aggregate them over time.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Our new paper offers an explanation for the universal law that "under carefully controlled conditions.... an animal behaves as it damn well pleases." We explore how stochastic mechanisms may play an underappreciated role in generating individuality. (1/7 🧵)
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
My English teachers should NOT have taught me how to use a semi-colon; with a way to make super long but grammatically correct sentences, I am unstoppable and annoying in everything I write
(Currently revising a manuscript and Noticing how I write 😅)
