@blaircostelloe
Behavioral ecologist using drones to study collective behavior of African ungulates. Leader of HerdHover project and co-PI of WildDrone project. Project Leader at the Max Planck Institute for Animal Behavior, currently on TT job market. She/her.
photos from an excellent study by Cohen et al (2021) of a cerambycid beetle just straight up doing it with the flower of Disa forficaria, in a classic example of a ~sexual mimicry pollination system~
the humiliation of going on a hot date then finding out she wasn't even in the same PHYLUM (then someone writes a whole paper about it, with photos of your wiener)
Scientists in Indonesia have drone-tagged a pygmy blue whale for the first time, revealing a previously unknown migration route to western Australia.
Researchers warn ship strikes, noise and climate change remain key threats. Timor-Leste teams plan to replicate the method.
Post Doc Alert: "large mammal monitoring in northwest Montana...part of a collaborative project between the University of Montana and Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Parks." More: www.schooljobs.com/careers/ummi... 🧪
I am hiring a research assistant (vampire bats), a Panama fieldwork coordinator (vampire bats), and also considering postdoc apps (social behavior, any species): socialbat.org/2026/02/19/h...
Fantastic opportunity to work with us at Shark Bay Dolphin Research 👇🏻
Yes please
New blog post!!🚨
Michael Chimento gives an overview of the new R package STbayes, designed for creating, fitting and understanding Bayesian models of social transmission 🌍 🧪
Read the blog here 👇
Excited to announce our courses for #MovementEcology.🤗
This year we will be in #Africa @mpalarc.bsky.social at Mpala Research Centre. Starting with a basic R course designed for #AfricanResearchers, followed by a two-week international Animove workshop. animove.org/basic-r-cour... Please share 👍
BIG FIGHT AT POLAND’S WROCLAW ZOO!!!
They’re stealing from us. They are stealing from us and we have to put a stop to this. This cannot stand.
Richard McElreath: It must not be overlooked that junior researchers DO NOT TRUST US. We, the directors, are a big part of the problem. We made this system, we remake it every year, and we benefit from it. What can we do to credibly signal our commitment to reform a corrupt research culture? My conversations with junior scientists in the society has taught me that directors are too often either indifferent or hostile to science reform. We cannot hope to convince our prize winning colleagues. Their egos are immune. But we can replace retirements with researchers who care more about integrity than their own prestige. This is important both for earning the trust of the junior researchers who really do the research in the MPG and for attracting excellent future directors and starting to earn the trust of the public. So I suggest two strong signals to our junior researchers (and the public): (1) we will reform recruitment and promotion at all levels to eliminate proxies like citation counts and journal brands in favor of reliability and sustainability; (2) we will make open science skills a core part of scientific training, through the graduate schools at a minimum, as conditions for the central funding. The most ambitious thing we could do, as hinted at in item 5 above, is to meaningfully invest in metascientific research. As the largest basic research organization in the world, the MPG is uniquely suited to studying research and its products from a broad perspective that includes the humanities, the sciences, and policy. Governments are already involved in science reform. Someone should study it in an organized and sustained way.
The Max Planck Society has begun an exploratory round table for open science. We are drafting some recommendations to leadership. Still a long way to go! But here are my notes on the most recent draft, just so you all know how I am trying to steer things.
An absolute bedrock institution for understanding how the planet works, just civilization-scaled vandalism by the most incurious morons on Earth
Have you ever wondered what you would find if you could keep your eyes on a bee for more than a few meters? Us, too!
preprint (with videos!) + thread 🧵
Precise, individualized foraging flights in honey #bees 🐝 revealed by multicopter drone-based tracking
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
1/9
Done!
Interested in a multidisciplinary PhD that integrates robotics, computer vision, ecology and conservation?
We are looking for 12 Doctoral Candidates to join the WildBotics MSCA Doctoral Network!
Positions are fully funded for 36 months!
More info & apply @ www.wildbotics.eu/recruitment
🧪👩🔬🌍
New from us. 2025. Adaptive behavioural strategies to seasonal challenges by a semiurban feral ungulate. (Water buffalo) Led by @debottam1991.bsky.social www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
🚨 New Publication on Feral Water Buffalo 🐃 🐃 in Animal Behaviour [Also my 1st publication in AB 😊]
@asab.org @asabeducation.bsky.social
Adaptive behavioural strategies to seasonal challenges by a semiurban feral ungulate
W/ @amcell.bsky.social Kate Flay & Hannah Mumby
doi.org/10.1016/j.an...
Interested in a multidisciplinary PhD that integrates robotics, computer vision, ecology and conservation?
We are looking for 12 Doctoral Candidates to join the WildBotics MSCA Doctoral Network!
Positions are fully funded for 36 months!
More info & apply @ www.wildbotics.eu/recruitment
🧪👩🔬🌍
@asab.org Spring, aimed at ECRs, is coming to Bristol!
Conference grant DEADLINE for Developing Country Applicants (<£2500) or anyone needing an early decision for visas (<£750) is in ONE WEEK, 1st December.
www.asab.org/conference-g...
Referee statement also needed by then! 🐝🐜🦟🦂🐠🐟🐬🦎🐸🦆🐿️🦓
FERAL goes wild:
🦓 Drone footage of Grevy’s zebras (with @blaircostelloe.bsky.social, Ben Koger and @icouzin.bsky.social)
Pose-estimation pipelines struggled to detect vigilance behavior from overhead drone videos.
FERAL identifies vigilance bouts directly from video.
So impressed with this software! Check it out!
Give FERAL:
1. videos
2. behavioral annotations
FERAL fine-tunes a video foundation model on your data.
FERAL outputs:
- segmented ethograms
- model weights you can reuse
All in few lines of code (no ML or coding expertise needed). It runs easily on Google Colab.
Try it yourself: www.getferal.ai
Our preprint is out! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Peter Skovorodnikov and I are excited to present FERAL: a new video-understanding toolkit that maps raw video directly to behavior, no pose estimation required.
It works across species, from lab to field, and even in collective systems. (🧵1/n)
The amount of AI generated art in slides at this conference, primarily used by older scientists, is killing me. Scientists please. Don’t use these ai platforms to make your figures or slides. They look bad and I have yet to see them meaningfully improve the message of talks.
Opportunity to join our team. Open to African students at Masters or PhD level.
I wanted to get a video of this ghost crab but every time I got close to their hole they scuttled back in, so I tried getting clever with it. I made a little sandcastle and shoved my phone into it, hit record, and walked away. Crab was VERY suspicious of this addition to their environment.
We built a calculator that doesn't work, but don't worry, it's also a plagiarism machine that will tell you to kill yourself. It runs on the world's oceans and costs 10 trillion dollars.
I want to explain a few things and then it might be clearer why UK trans people are upset.
In 2001 I married my wife, Sylvia.
In 2005 I started medical transition. (1/13)
students in last year's advanced bootcamp on software development and version control
view of the Highseas Conference Center where the course is held
🍂 Applications are now open for our ML-for-Behavior 5-day course at Jackson Labs in Bar Harbor, ME.
Talks and hands-on workshops cover pose estimation, supervised/unsupervised behavior quantification, and downstream behavior analyses. Financial aid is available!
www.jax.org/education-an...
I am currently advertising a new 3-year research position in my TerraLuma team: Research Associate in Drone Field Operations (Academic Level A)
The position will support the Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network’s (@TERN_Aus) Dronescape project.
careers.utas.edu.au/cw/en/job/50...
