A big welcome to the two newest #LaurierBiology faculty members: Dr. @j-mako-tsuji.eurosky.social & Dr. @andifischer10.bsky.social! Welcome to @wilfridlaurieruni.bsky.social! @wlufa.bsky.social

I'm stoked to inform you that as of today I have joined the Department of Biology at Wilfrid Laurier University! Our lab will continue to study how and what animals communicate - and their vulnarability to our actions - and what we can do for sustainability. More exciting posts will follow

GRATITUDE: Farewell to our lab at the University of Greifswald. For the last three years we discovered, learned, taught, grew and gathered many fun memories. The city has become the home of my family with many dear friends. A new home awaits, but not without turning and appreciating what has been

I am looking for PhD students and postdocs to join my lab at the University of Pittsburgh in Fall 2027. Anyone excited about urban evolution, hummingbirds, & community engagement, please reach out! And/or find me at #AOS2026 this week! More info here: www.valentina-alaasam.com

Super proud of our PhD student Madesh Kamalakannan who presented on male inhibition of female attractiveness @isbe2026.bsky.social Thank you for all the great questions - and well done Madesh!

we are excited to be at the @isbe2026.bsky.social in Turino, Italy! Looming forward to the exciting science, fantastic crowd and new and old connections :D

FERAL 1.0 is out! Just to remind you: FERAL is an open-source toolkit for supervised animal behaviour segmentation directly from videos with no pose estimation needed. We made it much easier to install and run FERAL First, to install FERAL: pip install feral www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 🧵

FERAL: A Supervised Video-Understanding System for Direct Video-to-Behavior Mapping

Quantifying animal behavior often requires segmenting continuous actions into discrete, interpretable states, yet most automated pipelines infer actions from keypoint dynamics and are limited by keypo...

biorxiv.org

After years of development, collaboration, and hard work, it's finally here! Now published in Bioinformatics: Foundation model enables interpretable open and error-tolerant searching for mass spectrometry-based proteomics academic.oup.com/bioinformati... #TeamMassSpec #DeepLearning #AI #Proteomics

Foundation model enables interpretable open and error-tolerant searching for mass spectrometry-based proteomics

AbstractMotivation. Mass spectrometry-based proteomics allows studying all proteins of a sample on a molecular level. However, mass spectra are noisy and c

academic.oup.com

➡️ New article out! ⬅️ What Lives? A Meta-Analysis of Diverse Opinions on the Definition of Life by Reed Bender, Karina Kofman, Blaise Agüera y Arcas & Michael Levin (@blaiseaguera.bsky.social, @drmichaellevin.bsky.social) Open access: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

What Lives? A Meta-Analysis of Diverse Opinions on the Definition of Life - Biological Theory

The question of "what is life?" has challenged scientists and philosophers for centuries, producing an array of definitions that reflect both the mystery of its emergence and the diversity of discipli...

link.springer.com

Please repost: I am looking for a postdoctoral researcher to work on projects related to understanding the movement ecology of harmful and beneficial insects in agroecosystems. Applications close on: July 31, 2026 To apply and for more information, visit: lnkd.in/g8gFeB3u

The #Australian ballista #spider (Propostira sp.) uses its silk's elastic energy storage capacity to build the most powerful snare and selective in the #animal kingdom. Read about our discovery here: doi.org/10.1016/j.cu... Video by Ajay Narendra. Recorded with 3,000 fps, playback 100x slowed down!

We congratulate our Frederik Berndt who excellently defended his B.Sc. Thesis on pheromonal rival male deterrence using a widow spider model! Great data! We will wrap them up over 2 publications - and that for an undergraduate project #proudPI

What a exciting work, it was a true pleasure to reflect and write together on such a nice topic @robinheinennl.bsky.social @mhanusch.bsky.social @chemodiversity.bsky.social

Robin Heinen@robinheinennl.bsky.social · 3mo ago

An exciting day today. Our work, co-led by @mhanusch.bsky.social and @thomasdussarrat.bsky.social was published in Nature Ecology & Evolution. In this review, we explore the concept of chemodiversity and what role it could play for ecological functions at landscape-level. doi.org/10.1038/s415...

We are hiring! The Canadian Tick Research and Innovation Centre is looking for a Project Manager. #tickresearch #projectmanagerposition

Scientific conferences can be a bore. Can jokes liven them up? Science Careers speaks with ecologist @stefanomammola.bsky.social about the power of humor to enhance science communication. https://scim.ag/4uCVf1N

Scientific conferences can be a bore. Can jokes liven them up?

Science speaks with ecologist Stefano Mammola about the power of humor to enhance science communication

science.org

We are seeking a talented postdoctoral fellow working on Tick Chemical Ecology and Neurology at the Canadian Tick Research and Innovation Centre (CTRIC), Acadia University! #tickresearch #postdoctoralposition

Last year, J. Endler published an inspiring essay in @behavecol.bsky.social on what we should be doing as behavioral ecologists 👉 doi.org/10.1093/beheco/araf029. According to him, "we need to put Ecology back into Behavioural Ecology: we need to make a lot more use of Natural History" (1/5)

Preprint: Dishonesty can be based on honesty. Increased pheromonal attractiveness despite reduced pheromone production in a aging female spider. Senescent widow spiders are poor mates but remain attractive to mate-seeking males through deceptive signalling. doi.org/10.64898/2026.03.04.709482

#rstats Here's a useful guide to creating publication-ready #ggplot figures to journal specifications, which is often quite fiddly. jaquent.github.io/2026/02/crea...

Our BehaveAI paper has just come out! Easy & effective tracking & behavioural classification, even with tiny (2px), fast moving, camouflaged objects. Paper: doi.org/10.1371/jour... Download: github.com/troscianko/B... @uniexecec.bsky.social @kevinjgaston.bsky.social @jimamclgalloway.bsky.social

Review on The Chemical Ecology of Arachnids - Morphology, Behaviour and Semiochemicals now out as PREPRINT doi.org/10.32942/X22... with Kirk Hillier, Lise Roy and @nicolettafaraone.bsky.social We are grateful for any feedback to improve the review during the submission process

I am looking for a PhD working on tracking trait changes in insects/spiders at the Leibniz Institute for the Analysis of Biodiversity change @leibnizlib.bsky.social and the University of Hamburg. Apply here: www.uni-hamburg.de/en/stellenan...

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uni-hamburg.de

Chromosome-scale #genomes from newly sequenced spiders & the whip scorpion, the genetic basis of spinneret emergence in spiders & the complex history & functional importance of arachnid genome #evolution www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... #biodiversity #genomics

An ancient genome duplication event drives the development and evolution of spinnerets in spiders

A genome duplication event during the Silurian played a crucial role in the evolutionary emergence of spinnerets in spiders.

science.org

3-year PhD position in insect ecophysiology and land-use intensity with PD Dr. Florian Menzel (@unimainz.bsky.social) and Prof. Dr. Thomas Schmitt ( #Würzburg ). Application deadline: February 4th, 2026. More info here: www.blogs.uni-mainz.de/fb10-evoluti... #insects #ecophysiology #land-use #CHCs

The long-held belief that only female mosquitoes bite may not be true after all. Very excited to have had the opportunity to contribute to this study showing that male mosquitoes can also bite and feed on blood. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Super excited to have this paper out. We developed a complex set of ground truth samples to test more than 110 statistical approaches for differential #metaproteomics We can now give clear guidance on what tests perform well. Thank you Tjorven Hinzke and @benoitkunath.bsky.social for the leadership

Evaluation of statistical approaches for differential metaproteomics

Metaproteomics characterizes and compares molecular phenotypes of organisms in communities by comprehensively analyzing their protein expression profiles using statistical methods. However, not all st...

biorxiv.org

This is such an important, rigorous, and beautiful paper by Rochelle - light pollution impacts both the "normal" visual cues of detecting sunset to trigger activity AND the polarised visual cues of the sky used for navigation...in two completely different animal species! 🦋🕷️🌌 Such amazing work!

Rochelle Meah@rochellemeah.bsky.social · 8mo ago

Multiple anthropogenic stressors can negatively impact species but can a single stressor also have multiple, concurrent impacts? Here we show that light pollution creates several simultaneous impacts to the nocturnal movement ecology of a moth and a spider: tinyurl.com/5eku5bff (1/5)

Been saying this for a while that LLMs can't create new scientific knowledge simply because they use a predictive model. This paper by Chinese and American researchers shows this limitation of LLMs. Good for brainstorming research questions and hypotheses, but can't create new knowledge.