Animals Doing Stuff in Groups

We saw so many ragworms during fieldwork today, bright green for the breeding season! @animalsdoingstuff.bsky.social

Replication studies: a win-win for early-career training and behavioral ecology Replicating previous research builds confidence that results are real and meaningful. But close replications are rare due to limitations in resources and d

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...

Resistance evolution in parasitoid biocontrol: understanding the rule, managing the exceptions In contrast to chemical pest control, biological control (biocontrol) is generally considered evolutionarily stable, with pests rarely evolving resist…

Happy #waspwednesday everyone! Here's the latest article from wasp HQ www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

In a nutshell - controlling crop pests using parasitoid wasps is evolutionarily resilient to resistance evolution in pests because parasitoids are cool #science #evolution #parasitoid

Volume 229 Issue Suppl_1 | Journal of Experimental Biology | The Company of Biologists Journal of Experimental Biology (JEB) is the leading primary research journal in comparative physiology and biomechanics.

A new special issue in JEB tackles the important problem of animal sensory perception in a changing world. Includes a paper by Cait Newport and me, on the visual challenges that fish face when navigating journals.biologists.com/jeb/issue/22...

Three members of team fish wearing waders and carrying buckets across the rocky shore

A brief break from the beautiful Scottish weather we've been having lately finally allowed us to get out for a little spot of fieldwork yesterday! @animalsdoingstuff.bsky.social 🦀☔🪸

We've got ISSUES. Literally.

We scraped >100k special issues & over 1 million articles to bring you a PISS-poor paper. We quantify just how many excess papers are published by guest editors abusing special issues to boost their CVs. How bad is it & what can we do?

arxiv.org/abs/2601.07563

A 🧵 1/n

A call for CARE in animal behaviour: an holistic ethical research framework Despite increasing awareness of animal welfare, there are vast discrepancies between legal protections and recommended practices for different species…

🚨 Our new paper is out!! A call for CARE in animal behaviour: an holistic ethical research framework 🐾💚 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

New paper out today in Ecology and Evolution! Link below. Congrats PhD student @smthmpsn.bsky.social, on your first paper. All about how wild birds learn to avoid a novel aposematic warning signal. And a nice nod to Britney Spears in the paper title.

Residents of an inshore Bridlington Bay shipwreck attend the BRUV for day 4 of #25DaysOfFishmas. A shoal of pouting investigate the bait cage, while tucked away in a triangular hole top left is a rarely filmed visitor in these waters - a shy conger eel awakes and surveys the melee outside! 🐟🧐🎅🦑

Delighted that one of my Antarctic winter photos has won the 2025 Royal Society Photography Competition, Earth Science & Climatology category.

Captured during polar-night surveys of ocean conditions near Antarctic Peninsula glaciers.

royalsociety.org/journals/pub...

The GP turned Isle of Wight dinosaur hunter rewriting history Retired doctor Jeremey Lockwood has used his medical skills to discover three new dinosaur species

A great article about @nhm-london.bsky.social Scientific Assiciate and generally fabulous human @valdosaurus.bsky.social www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

After 5 years of sample collection and analysis our paper examining the impacts of an industrial #DeepSea mining trial on seafloor #biodiversity is published! Read here: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Playing dice with behavior: drivers of stochastic individuality Animal behavior is often viewed as stemming from predictable genetic and environmental factors. However, despite our best attempts to control genetic …

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...

From preferences to pollination: do hummingbirds and bees differ in how they choose flowers?

#PhD position!

Comparing #foraging and #cognition in #hummingbirds and #bumblebees

Fieldwork in the Canadian Rockies, lab experiments at @newcastleuni.bsky.social, and ecological modelling at @uniofstandrews.bsky.social

Details (including my email) here: iapetus.ac.uk/studentships...

The more complex three or four component calls are social calls produced by the Soprano Pipistrelle to communicate with other bats. Great recordings by the students from St Andrews! Analysed using Kaleidoscope from @wildlifeacoustics.com
#acoustic #ecology #bats #echolocation #fieldwork

The Pipistrelle is echolocating at about 55 kHz and has a wingspan of roughly 20cm, while the Free-tailed Bat is huge, with a wingspan of 45cm. It’s echolocating at a much lower frequency: 10-16 kHz, within the range of human hearing. @animalsdoingstuff.bsky.social

While on their field course with us, MSc students from the University of St Andrews carried out independent research projects. One group studied bat behaviour using ultrasonic recorders. Here, they’ve managed to record a Soprano Pipistrelle and a European Free-tailed Bat.
@mikemwebster.bsky.social

Humans perceive but animals don’t: pitfalls in using plasticine models for assessing biotic interactions buff.ly/7hcLYXx | #ProcB #Ecology

Check out this fascinating special edition of the Journal of Fish Biology @thefsbi.bsky.social focussed on how we study cognition in fishes- led by lab alumnus @nickarjones.bsky.social

City lizards are more social. In a new paper in #BiologyLetters, social network analysis revealed that urban lizards have more social connections and stronger bonds than their non-urban counterparts. buff.ly/kqf2YfZ | #Behaviour #UrbanEcology

Multi-generational vulture nests hold 700 years of human artifacts Crossbow bolts, sandals, slingshots, and more.

super cool study found human artifacts in Bearded vulture nests, incl. "weaponry like a crossbow bolt and wooden lance, decorated sheep leather, and parts of a slingshot....a shoe made from twigs and grass is ~675-years-old." link to paper: doi.org/10.1002/ecy..... www.popsci.com/environment/... 🧪🌍🦉

CrowdScience - Why are some animals black and white? - BBC Sounds Why are zebras so stripy? Why do penguins wear tuxedos?

In a world bursting with colour, why go monochrome? I joined Tim Caro & Martin How on the BBC World Service’s Crowdscience to explore why some animals stand out in stark contrast. From 🦓🐼🐧 it turns out the answers aren’t always so black & white 😉

www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...

Antagonistic interactions between fish (Ophidiiformes) and one of the isocrinid individuals (Endoxocrinus parrae). Initially the fish is on the aboral side of the crinoid's strongly, flexed arms (A). The fish moving to the crinoid's adoral side and making quick strikes directed at the tips of the arms (B, C). Arm-flailing by the crinoid pushes the fish away from the crown (D).

🆕 in the ESA Bulletin's Photo Gallery: A deep-sea fight between a fish & a sea lily, previously speculated but not actually observed, caught on camera and described in @ESAEcology's #TheScientificNaturalist series

See more 📸: doi.org/10.1002/bes2...
Read the study: doi.org/10.1002/ecy....

Animal brains don’t think in a vacuum, they think in heatwaves & hypoxia, and around predators, parasites, and social groups. Our new review maps mechanisms, timescales, and gaps for understanding animal cognition in changing environments: authors.elsevier.com/a/1lau5Esvgs...

Winter ASAB 2025 December 15th-16th Edinburgh ASABwinter.github.io/2025/ How sensory information affects behaviour Logo of a moth

Join us for #ASABWinter2025 in Edinburgh Dec 15-16 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

Abstracts for posters/talks due Aug 29

More details here: asabwinter.github.io/2025/

Gloger's Rule or Historical Conjecture? Tests in Mammals Ecogeographical rules for animal coloration include Gloger's rule, which states that homeotherms are darker at lower latitudes; however, 19th-century naturalists observed that animals are more colour...

Interesting new paper on color "rules" in terrestrial mammals, suggesting that Gloger's rule actually holds:

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Antagonistic effects of predator color morph abundance and saliency on prey anti-predator responses Predators can have different color morphs, but whether morph abundance or saliency is more influential in shaping antipredator behavior in prey remains unc

🔴New #trumpetfish content!🔴 This species is colour #polymorphic so we dove (pun intended) into how the relative abundance and saliency of each morph influences the #behaviour of their prey. Find out more via the link below! 🎺🐠
🔗 tinyurl.com/39vn5skp #behavioralecology

🐚🦀

Mapping nonhuman cultures with the Animal Culture Database - Scientific Data Scientific Data - Mapping nonhuman cultures with the Animal Culture Database

Happy to share our new paper introducing the Animal Culture Database in Scientific Data: We’re putting together a resource consolidating primary research on cultural behaviors in wild animal populations and how they’re affected by human activity (1/5) www.nature.com/articles/s41...

This is how it looks when a Sea Anemone runs away from a Starfish.