Well done Louie!

Vivek Nityananda@viveknityananda.bsky.social · last wk.

So proud of Louie Yip from our lab who gave a brilliant talk about his PhD work on bee active vision! #ICN2026 #bees #vision

So proud of Louie Yip from our lab who gave a brilliant talk about his PhD work on bee active vision! #ICN2026 #bees #vision

Day 3 of #ISBE2026 is off and running! Felicity Muth tells us about bees and bee cognition. In bumblebees, queens are the quicker learners compared to workers because they just can't afford to get it wrong. Yas queen 👸

The University of Exeter have announced a programme of academic staff cuts, including all of www.exeter.ac.uk/research/gro... Sign the open letter of support at docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F... @crab-exeter.bsky.social

Centre for Research in Animal Behaviour (CRAB) | Research Groups | University of Exeter

exeter.ac.uk

New paper🪺 It is mainly male zebra finches that collect nest material, but in the nest females handle nest material as much as males. Stellar efforts by my former students Emma Ramsay & Daniel Olivares Gallego finally out. @cogwild.bsky.social @medicalsciencesncl.bsky.social #BiologyLetters

Royal Society Publishing@royalsocietypublishing.org · 2mo ago

Nest building as a missing piece in biparental care doi.org/10.1098/rsbl... | #BiologyLetters #Behaviour #Ecology #Evolution

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

Join me & @olliepadget.bsky.social at @livuninews.bsky.social! #postdoc #seabird movement & navigation in response to environmental cues @ukri.org. Developing new loggers w/ micro-engineers & computer scientists @yorkuniversity.bsky.social. Job tinyurl.com/2zuzktv5 Press release tinyurl.com/2zuzktv5

This book has just been published, open access, edited by Ken Cheng and me. It contains multiple chapters originating in a wonderful Strungmann Forum held in Frankfurt around a year ago. link.springer.com/book/10.1007...

Challenges in Navigation Research

This open access book explores navigation across species using a multidisciplinary approach to address challenges in research and clinical applications.

link.springer.com

Post-doc opportunity on comparative cognition and movement dynamics in corvids with the brilliant Prof Debbie Kelly at the University of Manitoba

Excited to share our new paper @royalsocietypublishing.org This one took what felt like endless maze trials. We found that even modest warming (~1°C) changed an ectotherm's behaviour such that it affected cognitive performance. Speeding them up and reducing decision accuracy.

Increasing temperature reduces decision accuracy by shifting speed–accuracy trade-offs in slower individuals

Abstract. Cognitive responses are linked to consistent individual behavioural variation, but the potential impact of warming on this relationship remains u

tiny.cc

We usually assume 🐜 ants 🐜 learn views when facing their goal, but our data shows that it is not necessarily the case! We combined field experiments with a biologically constrained model to show how a two-stage neural circuit (MB -> CX) could allow this: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New #PhD on #bees (BeeHd?)! Despite the ad saying "UK Students only", a limited number of scholarships are available for international candidates. So please apply!

Vivek Nityananda@viveknityananda.bsky.social · 6mo ago

New PhD alert! We'll be applying animal welfare ideas to look at how stress affects bees, looking at the effect on bee brains with @lenariab.bsky.social, and working with @sensibee.bsky.social developing new monitoring methods. Please spread the word! #bees #PhD 🧪 www.findaphd.com/phds/project...

To understand how fish use vision to navigate, we must first understand what they see. New review from Cait Newport and @burt15theresa.bsky.social in @jexpbiol.bsky.social 👇 doi.org/10.1242/jeb....

Comparative analysis across 5,678 insect species shows that, when you control for phylogenetic bias, eusociality has not evolved at a faster rate in haplodiploid species. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

With all this talk of cow tools now's a good time to mention my new paper with @abigaildesmond.bsky.social titled 'Why don't all animals use tools?' 🧪🛠️🐮 It's in press at the journal Animal Behaviour & Cognition. You can get a pdf of the accepted version from the research page of my site 🧵 1/

Research

twig.technology

A view of bird's eyes -- Pigeons lock their eyes in place during flight https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.01.07.698303v1

Can humans & animals really use internal maps to take shortcuts? Tolman famously said yes - based largely on his Sunburst maze. Our new review & meta-analysis suggests evidence is far weaker than you might think. 🧵👇 doi.org/10.1111/ejn.... @uofgpsychneuro.bsky.social @ejneuroscience.bsky.social

Tolman's Sunburst Maze 80 Years on: A Meta‐Analysis Reveals Poor Replicability and Little Evidence for Shortcutting

In 1946, Tolman et al. reported that rats could take a novel shortcut to a goal after training on an indirect route, supporting the Cognitive Map theory. However, a review of subsequent Sunburst maze...

doi.org

Male courtship dances have co-evolved with female preferences in peacock spiders, but with closely related species, assortative mating is “leaky” 🦚🕷️ #ASABWinter2025

Congratulations to Hanna Kokko for receiving this year’s ASAB medal! Hanna has done extraordinary work and we are so pleased to honour her at #ASABWinter2025

Fascinating Tinbergen Lecture by @toshitakaszk.bsky.social 🐦 on animal linguistics! Not only do Japanese tits have distinct sequence & predator calls 🐍🦅 they can also understand the calls of Willow tits!! You'll soon be able to get a copy of his book! #ASABWinter2025 @asab.org

Have you ever wondered what you would find if you could keep your eyes on a bee for more than a few meters? Us, too! preprint (with videos!) + thread 🧵 Precise, individualized foraging flights in honey #bees 🐝 revealed by multicopter drone-based tracking www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 1/9

New paper: Stick dexterity in carrion crows🥢 Commentary on Moll et al. 2025 in which they trained crows to use stick tools. Their neat set-up allowed tracking tool motions, showing that crows became more efficient over time. Could nest building affect their stick dexterity? Full text: rdcu.be/eSOMF

a drawing of a crow with its mouth open

Alt: a drawing of a crow with its beaks opening and closing

media.tenor.com

PhD position - How jumping spiders see - Put cute spiders on trackballs! - Program fancy automated experiments! - Do cutting edge research! - Hang out in beautiful Italian cities! - Be supervised by a super nice chap! Like invertebrate behaviour and computation stuff? You'll love this. Link in 🧵

#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...

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

iapetus.ac.uk

#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...

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

iapetus.ac.uk

I have a job opening in my lab. If you are interested in bird behaviour and predator prey interactions please take a look! werkenbij.uva.nl/en/vacancies...

Vacancy — Postdoc Position in Decision Making in Birds

Are you an expert in animal behavior? Do you have experience working with birds? The Institute of Biodiversity and Ecosystem Dynamics (IBED) is looking for a motivated researcher to investigate the ro...

werkenbij.uva.nl

Beautiful plenary by @mariatelloramos.bsky.social on the architecture of structures built by cooperative weaver sparrows 🐦 #EtoEcoEvo25

My latest Aronov lab paper is now published @Nature! When a chickadee looks at a distant location, the same place cells activate as if it were actually there 👁️ The hippocampus encodes where the bird is looking, AND what it expects to see next -- enabling spatial reasoning from afar bit.ly/3HvWSum

🎇✨Congratulations Prof. Susan Healy, our 2027 Research Award recipient (Uni. St Andrews, UK). A symposium + banquet will honor her contributions at the 2027 conference & a special issue will be published March 2028: 'In Honour of the Contributions of Susan Healy' #WomenInSTEM