Vlad Demartsev

Delighted to see our paper featured on the cover of the Journal of Animal Ecology @animalecology.bsky.social @britishecologicalsociety.org

Thanks Pam Hurkens for the lovely image of a heavily pregnant meerkat being weighed at our field site.

Detecting and classifying animal calls from audio data using animal2vec Post provided by Julian Schäfer-Zimmermann An introduction for people lacking a machine-learning background We provide a non-technical explanation of the animal2vec framework, including its capabil…

Check out our new blog post!🚨

Authors provide an overview of the animal2vec framework, including its capabilities and potential for usage in animal behavior, ecology, and conservation research 🔊 🌍 🧪

Read more here👇

Graphic explaining the process to annotate sperm whale codas in western music notation. Step 1: Graphic of a person with headphones, listening. Step 2: A Spektrogram, showing sound amplitude over time, with four sperm whale clicks and three musical beats as red line. Step 3: Western Musical Notation, a 3/4 rhythm, four notes are shown.

Paper Out in #NYAS: Using Rhythmic Notation and Musical Analysis on Animal Communication: A Case Study on Sperm Whales🔊🐳
doi.org/10.1111/nyas...
We use Western music notation to transcribe sperm whale codas. What can we learn about them using musical analysis🎼🎶?

All that socializing at dawn before a double espresso... it's a miracle! ☕✨

The answer to life, the universe, and everything? Just saying 'hello' to your neighbors from a warm spot in the sun! ☀️

🤣 Honestly, they're much more polite than the usual morning poolside rush

Dominance asymmetries shape vocal exchanges in meerkats Meerkats use more than physical grooming to manage their social relationships. They exchange short calls while warming in the sun that affect group members

So, it turns out that even a simple morning 'Hello' 👋can be the glue that helps to hold the group together. The full story is just out in @behavecol.bsky.social

academic.oup.com/beheco/advan...

@cbehav.bsky.social @uni-konstanz.de @livingingroups.bsky.social @mpi-animalbehav.bsky.social

Meerkats in the Kalahari Desert - Sunbathing, Calling and Grooming Behaviour YouTube video by Universität Konstanz

These exchanges might act as a form of "vocal grooming". While physical grooming is time-consuming and requires close proximity, calling could help meerkats to regulate their social relationships from a distance. www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLuI...

The dominants, on the other hand, seemed less concerned; they didn't change their calling behavior toward any of their group mates 🤷. In meerkat despotic society, the "little guys" do the heavy lifting to keep the vocal conversation going.

We found that subordinate meerkats, the group's helpers, increase their calling rate when they hear a dominant individual 👑. "Investing in communication” could be a strategic way for subordinates to maintain relationships with the most influential members of the team.

We recorded individual sunning calls 🎤 and played them back 🔊 to other meerkats to see how they would react. By analyzing their vocal responses, we were able to see how dominance and social bonds shape how meerkats exchange these signals. @cinig.bsky.social @arispeshkin.bsky.social @marta_manser

To answer this, we visited the Kalahari Research Centre in South Africa and observed meerkat groups at dawn ☀️ We built social networks to calculate the "tie strength," or the specific bond between every pair of meerkats in the group, based on who they chose to sunbathe with 🐾🕶️

🧪Before the day begins, meerkats share a unique ritual. After emerging from their burrows, they spend up to an hour "sunning" to warm up for the day. During this quiet time, they produce soft, tonal "sunning calls". Just standing, sunbathing, and calling. But why❓ #bioacoustics #meerkats #kalahari

🚨Watch out! A new meerkat update is coming your way tomorrow 🐾☀️
Stay tuned for a full thread 📅

The science behind clumsiness How a snowy trip to the ER made me wonder about brains and being clumsy.

After a trip to the ER for an extremely avoidable silly accident, I started wondering about the neuroscience behind being clumsy.

Sounds interesting? Have a look at my post on Substack!

🧪Here is a photo of a pūkeko, standing in a wetland, not making a sound🐦
BUT... off-camera things get loud and complex. Simple sounds combine into calls and calls stack into sequences. New paper lead by @cinig.bsky.social with @cecibaldoni.bsky.social @pminasandra.bsky.social #bioacoustics

🚨🧪Listening to animals at scale is hard. animal2vec does the listening for you, automatically finding and classifying animal calls in huge datasets. Plus: MeerKAT, a massive new meerkat vocalization dataset, now public. #bioacoustics
besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/99RWYS...

A brief natural history of misinformation Abstract. The idea that organisms benefit by acquiring information through social connections is a cornerstone of our understanding of social evolution and

"misinformation is widespread in biological systems spanning levels of organization, and [...] is probably an inevitable property that inherits from fundamental constraints on biological communication systems, rather than a pathology"
royalsocietypublishing.org/rsif/article...

🚀 Guess who’s back? 🛰️🥳💫
ICARUS, our global wildlife-tracking system, returns to orbit aboard the GENA-OT satellite, which launched from Vandenberg SFB today 🎉
This is step one for ICARUS 2.0: full global coverage, smaller sensors, near-real-time.
Congrats @animaltracking.bsky.social + team ICARUS

Burden of a failed error culture in biologging Driven by technological advancement and low cost, biologging has rapidly transformed the study of animal behaviour and ecology, providing unprecedente…

2025. Burden of a failed error culture in biologging. #AnimalWelfare #AnimalEthics via @asab.org #AnimalBehaviour www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

The respiratory cycle modulates distinct dynamics of affective and perceptual decision-making Author summary Breathing is more than just a vital process for survival — it influences how we perceive and interact with the world around us. Recent research suggests that the rhythm of breathing, fr...

🧠 New paper on breathing and the brain, out now
@plos.org Computational Biology! 🫁
"The respiratory cycle modulates distinct dynamics of affective and perceptual decision-making"
doi.org/10.1371/jour...
We show how respiratory 'tidal computations' alter our decisons!

🚨Who wants to work with Kalahari meerkats? A MSc project with @mathildemartin.bsky.social at the University of Zurich.
#bioacoustics 🧪

Great summary of our study by @uni-konstanz.de Thank you so much 👍🏻

Read the whole story here - www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Big thanks to the co-authors @amiyaal.bsky.social Eli Geffen @leekoren.bsky.social Yair Geva Pablo Alba-González
And to @cbehav.bsky.social @uni-konstanz.de @livingingroups.bsky.social TAU BIU

🔍 Bottom line: 1⃣Wails satisfy several of our framework criteria for functioning as Alerting components in hyrax communication. 2⃣ This attention-capturing trick isn’t unique to hyraxes! Our framework is ready to be applied across species 🐒🐭🦊🐝🦆

We did 📡sound propagation experiments, analyzed 🎶song structure and 🎤signaler behavior, and tested 👂listener responses to songs with ✂️degraded Wail elements.

Sing YouTube video by Rock hyrax behaviors

Our study species, Rock hyraxes sing long, complex songs 🎶made of wails, chucks, and snorts. Wails occur mostly at the beginning of the song so we thought they might function as "Alerting components"
www.youtube.com/watch?v=dG1M...

but until now, there was no standardized way to test this🤷‍♂️, so we had to come up with one:
🧩 We defined 3 measurable criteria for alerting components:
📡 better spatial propagation / saliency
🎤 flexible use by the signaler
👂⚡️ stronger + faster receiver responses

Why does grabbing attention matters❓Animals often live in noisy environments. Many vocal signals start with a “HEY, LISTEN!” - an intro that boosts attention and detectability before the informational content arrives.

🚨STOP SCROLLING, IT’S AN EMERGENCY BROADCAST📣 This message will self-destruct in 10…9…8…7…⏰ …now that I have your attention:
🧪Our new paper on Alerting Components in animal vocalization is out in AnimBehav🎉
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
#AnimalBehaviour #Bioacoustics #Communication