New study, led by Aaron Fairweather, provides a robust method to test impacts of #pesticide exposure on soil-nesting insects. We found substantive negative impacts on ants after soil drench applications of imidacloprid including behavioural changes & increased mortality: doi.org/10.1093/etoj...

Lunch time! Paper wasps (Polistes dominula)

www.nature.com/articles/s41... Super cool! Evolution co-opted ancestral feeding mechanisms to enable cooperative brood care and age-related division of labour

Ancient feeding-related neuropeptides regulate alloparenting in ants - Nature

Pharmacological screening and behavioural assays in ants identify two specific neuropeptides that have key and opposite effects in regulating brood care, and that link nutritional state to age-depende...

nature.com

Why paying peer reviewers works, according to a journal’s editor-in-chief www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Why paying peer reviewers works, according to a journal’s editor-in-chief

A biology journal that paid peer reviewers found that the approach cut the time to a first editorial decision by 85% and maintained high-quality reviews.

nature.com

It's paper double bill day! Paper 1: In @royalsocietypublishing.org the brilliant Luigi Baciadonna and I asked how variable #bee #optimism is. Individual bees do not make consistently optimistic choices over days even if the group is remarkably consistent. royalsocietypublishing.org/rsbl/article...

Temporal consistency of judgement biases in bumblebees

Abstract. Judgement bias tasks are increasingly used to assess affective states in animals, yet the extent to which they might reflect transient states or

royalsocietypublishing.org

Animal Intelligences (Carocci Editore) will be available in bookshops tomorrow. Writing it was deeply challenging, rewarding and enlightening. I hope it helps general readers discover the wonder and scientific complexity of animal minds beyond observable behavior!! www.carocci.it/prodotto/int...

A very nice and digestible coverage of my latest paper ! 🐝🔀

Science X / Phys.org@sciencex.bsky.social · 2mo ago

A flashing light disrupted honey bee reversal learning in opposite ways. Bees trained with a time gap between scent and reward stopped responding altogether, unlike bees trained with overlap. doi.org/hb49qj

Do insects feel pain or is it just a reflex? We found that GABAergic signalling modulates bumblebee nocifensive responses. A centrally acting drug reduced these behaviors and altered brain gene expression, suggesting modulation of the central nervous system rather than a simple peripheral reflex

I am very pleased to announce our upcoming Theo Murphy meeting at the Royal Society: Nature of Intelligence: Bridging Animal and Artificial Intelligence 21–22 September 2026 - Bristol, UK Registration deadline: 1 July Register here: lnkd.in/eGDAux-M #AI #AnimalCognition #Neuroscience