Lochlan W

New paper out: www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🥳 Congratulations to our PhD student Katja for her inspiring work just published in Nature Communications on how the larval zebrafish brain processes multiple visual features.

Check out a short summary of the work here: tinyurl.com/yzv4ct9k

Raccoons optimally forage for information: exploration–exploitation trade-offs in innovation Animals in rapidly changing environments, such as cities, should optimize information gathering to learn about and efficiently forage in these heterog…

Raccoon information seeking! Very cool work on raccoons optimizing information gain in puzzle solving from @sarahba.bsky.social and lab:
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

New paper out on the decision strategies of bumblebees. When using visual cues to make flower choices, they switch strategy with sensory context, learning as much as necessary, but as little as possible. Based on their training time, we propose a mechanism for this switch. tinyurl.com/2r9d4jrs 🌸🐝🧠

Sea-urchin spines generate electrical signals in flowing water The spines of sea urchins can generate a voltage when water moves around them — a phenomenon that could be used to design underwater flow sensors.

The spines of sea urchins can generate a voltage when water moves around them

go.nature.com/4kXv0yQ

During their search for food, most insects head specifically for the flowers that promise the highest reward. Researchers from the #UniKonstanz and the @uni-wuerzburg.de have now studied how bumblebees process information about their food sources. Full story: t1p.de/mndcd

Really interesting quantifications! Is the premise that a 'slow' or 'fast' ecology depends on the target organism's lifestyle - typical prey speed, typical behaviour speed, etc.?

Can lizards learn #spatial tasks? 🦎
A new study in Biology Letters examines spatial learning and the role of #lateralization in maze navigation.

Read more: royalsocietypublishing.org/rsbl/article...

@royalsocietypublishing.org

The natural architecture of oyster reefs maximizes recruit survival - Nature Survival of reef-building oysters peaks at specific combinations of fractal dimension and height that reduce predation, showing how optimal three-dimensional habitat geometry can guide more effective ecosystem restoration.

Nature research paper: The natural architecture of oyster reefs maximizes recruit survival

go.nature.com/4tJHqhw

Neuroscience has a species problem If neuroscience is serious about building general principles of brain function, cross-species dialogue must become a core organizing principle.

If neuroscience is serious about building general principles of brain function, cross-species dialogue must become a core organizing principle rather than an afterthought, writes @suthanalab.bsky.social.

#neuroskyence

www.thetransmitter.org/animal-model...

Using our bee-tracking drone, we discovered that honey bees 🐝 have highly precise and individual routes. Now published at @currentbiology.bsky.social : doi.org/10.1016/j.cu...

Functional gradients facilitate tactile sensing in elephant whiskers Keratin composites enable animals to hike with hooves, fly with feathers, and sense with skin. Mammalian whiskers are elongated keratin rods attached to tactile skin structures that extend the animal’...

So great! Mechanical engineers study the physics of elephant whiskers. Unlike mice, elephants don’t whisk. The physics of their whiskers suggests they amplify touch.
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Praying Mantids Adjust Head and Thorax Saccades to Track Visual Stimuli Moving at Different Speeds - Journal of Insect Behavior Animals frequently use movements of their eyes or heads to visually track objects in their environment. Visual tracking movements can be classified into two primary categories: smooth pursuit and sacc...

(Very) belated post but super jazzed to have my undergrad research thesis (and first ever publication) published at the Journal of Insect Behavior with @ceph-whisperer.bsky.social and @alexcnkingston.bsky.social! Check it out! link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Ansgar Büschges Interview with Ansgar Büschges, who studies the neural mechanisms of locomotion at the University of Cologne.

Interesting interview with Ansgar Bueschges of Uni Cologne.

"Today, neuroscience often focuses on genetically tractable organisms..." "But identifying true general principles requires comparison — between targeted, mechanism-specific processes." 💯💯

www.cell.com/current-biol...

Sensory Perception in a Changing World graphic. The graphic has a black background. The text in the top right says: Special Issue. Next line: Sensory Perception in a Changing World Next line: Guest Editors: Almut Kelber, Kathleen M. Gilmour and Sanjay Sane Next line: the Journal of Experimental Biology logo Left side of graphic: image showing a moth drinking nectar from a cluster of white flowers against two large circular green leaves

Read our new Special Issue, Sensory Perception in a Changing World, guest edited by Almut Kelber, Kathleen Gilmour and Sanjay Sane, featuring Reviews & Commentaries discussing the impact of environmental change on how animals perceive their surroundings

tinyurl.com/5t3mkrny

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...

Have you ever wondered how the brain should represent the sensory world in order to generate behavior? Read our new preprint: work by Shuhong Huang shuhonghuang.bsky.social with our long-standing collaborator James Fitzgerald at Northwestern.

Active sensing: Different plume structures affect movements of antennae in honey bees (Apis mellifera) Insects move their antennae to actively sense their environment. Regarding olfaction, it is not clear how these movements might be optimized for sampling the odor environment. Honey bees have movable ...

New data suggest that voluntary movements of honeybee antennae may reflect active sensing analogous to sniffing in mammals. @jexpbiol.bsky.social @chrisjernigan.bsky.social 🐝

journals.biologists.com/jeb/article/...

Check our latest work to model the sensorimotor pathway of grasping in primates also advancing embodied AI www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Flower constancy in pollinators: a bouquet of agendas shapes interactions among mutualistic partners Abstract. Plant–pollinator interactions have become a major research area because of their impact on key ecosystem services. One pollinator behaviour of pa

I'm pleased to share this new #openaccess review article on 🌻 flower constancy🌻 and how it shapes plant-pollinator interactions. I hope you'll find it useful 🐝🦋 🌺:

tinyurl.com/mrx59pt3

Excited to share my first PhD preprint! w/ Sören Kannegieser and @anna-stoeckl.bsky.social @insect-vision.bsky.social

We investigated how hawkmoths coordinate lateralized sensory and motor control for appendage guidance, revealing similar control principles to vertebrates doi.org/10.64898/202...

Any invertebrate gaze tracking? 👀

Multimodal social context modulates larval behavior in Drosophila
#Drosophila

Finally out in eLife!!
"Early foveal cortex predicts the features of saccade targets through feedback from higher cortical areas."
elifesciences.org/articles/107...

Figure showing a video still from a high speed video of a netcasting spider capturing a cricket with its elastic web held in the front legs. Left to the video still there are load-strain diagrams of different lines in the web showing that the upper lines are stiff and strong and the lower lines are highly extensible. Left to the diagrams there are scanning elactron microcopy images of the dfifferent lines, showing that the upper, stiffer lines are cables made of many parallal fibres, whereas the lower lines have a soft central core with adjoined looped fibres. The degree of looping correlates with how much the spiders post-process the silk after spinning. This way they can tailor the stiffness of each line in the web separately and create a vertical stiffness gradient throughout the whole web architecture from stiff and strong in the upper load bearing frame to soft and hyper-elastic in the lower part that is rapidly extended and thrown against the prey at high speed during the predatory strike.

Netcasting spiders modulate silk thread stiffness via a tailorable multi-fibre meta-structure to construct a web that is hyperelastic and high load-bearing at the same time.
Read about our discovery in PNAS: doi.org/10.1073/pnas...
🔓 & with video content!

🚨 🕷️ 🕸️ You thought netcasting spiders could not get any cooler?! You were wrong! Check out this new study lead by @wolffspider.bsky.social @evoimec.bsky.social showing how these spiders behaviorally tune their silk to be hyperelastic AND super load-bearing www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....

More than you would expect from studying AI and less than you would expect from studying neurobiology.

Model organisms promise insights into the human brain only if they’re representative. This new paper argues that convenience-driven choices weaken extrapolation in neuroscience, and highlights growing calls for comparative, evolution-informed approaches. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Diagram of field LED perturbations of fireflies, showing entrainment patterns and a phase response curve linking phase delay/advance to relative timing.

✨ New preprint from the lab on firefly synchronization, led by Owen Martin (freshly Dr. Martin!), with Nataliya Nechyporenko and Kaushik Jayaram.

Our measured firefly phase-response curves reveal excitatory and inhibitory timing rules that facilitate population synchrony ✨

doi.org/10.64898/202...

Motor learning and adaptation in bird flight https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.01.20.700397v1

Several fly larvae are crawling on an agar surface.

The second paper from the lab is now available on bioRxiv: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
We discovered that cannibalistic behavior in fly larvae is social-context dependent. Larval groups avoid dead conspecifics; individuals show high attraction. They only do it when no one is watching 😉