Animals Doing Stuff in Groups
@animalsdoingstuff.bsky.social
Hello, we are the Animals Doing Stuff in Groups lab, PI @mikemwebster.bsky.social at the University of St Andrews. We study animal behaviour and social interactions. 🐟(🐚🦀)🐧 https://sites.google.com/view/big-lab-webster/home?authuser=0
The only reason I can think of as to why there are fewer than 50,000 signatures here is that people haven't seen it yet. — Jason Arday: Demand a public inquiry now — goodlawproject.org/petition/jas...
Jason Arday: Demand a public inquiry now | Good Law Project
Commission an immediate public inquiry into how to ensure a responsible press given its contribution to Dr Arday’s tragic death.
goodlawproject.org
🧪 ETHOLOGY: What does group-living cost? 🐾👥 Makuya & Schradin argue studying solitary species can reveal hidden costs of social life—from disease transmission to competition. Comparing solitary and group-living individuals offers a way to measure these costs. #OpenAccess: doi.org/10.1111/eth.70098
Why we Should Study Solitary Species to Understand the Costs of Group‐Living
It's easier to measure the benefits than the costs of a trait. Solitary species benefit by avoiding the costs of group living. Thus, measuring benefits of solitary living informs us about the costs o...
doi.org
The BBC spoke to several content creators who all denied being motivated by social media views, clicks or revenue, and insisted they were supporting conservation or attempting to change public perceptions of sharks. Shark expert Dr Jack Cooper describes those claims as "ludicrous".
The influencers getting bitten chasing the perfect shark shot
Tayane Dalazen was on a shark-diving trip in Brazil when she was attacked.
bbc.com
Very glad that this is finally out! Former PhD student Bing found that wild plains zebras use visual and tactile cues to decide when to move as a group. Thanks to Cedric Sueur for the collaboration!
Plains zebra (Equus quagga) group movement decisions are associated with visual and tactile behaviours performed by initiators, followers and non-followers - Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology
Diverging needs often occurs among group members, prompting group-living animals to engage in collective decision-making, such as coordinating collective movement. Existing models classify these decis...
link.springer.com
I would absolutely fight for their inclusion. There needs to be more of this in papers not less. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
The declining use of animal and behaviour images in animal behaviour journals
It is difficult to overstate the value of images in science. Visualization is often the most effective tool to convey scientific concepts, and the opp…
sciencedirect.com
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
It’s a little nerve-wracking playing in another field’s sandbox, but this was a really fun way to bring some primatology to an ancient Egyptian conundrum.. so if you’re into big baboons, Egyptian dieties, etymological puzzles, &/or spectroscopy of shiny things.. read on! 🧪🏺🐒🌕 tinyurl.com/moonbaboon
Moonlight and the apotheosis of sacred baboons
Thoth was an ancient Egyptian deity of wisdom, writing, magic, and the moon. Manifestations of Thoth took the form of two animal species, the sacred ibis (Threskiornis aethiopicus) and sacred baboo...
tinyurl.com
@isbe2026.bsky.social, our new preprint is out! If you're interested in seasonal biases in ecology, check it out! Or, come and talk to us! @damienfarine.bsky.social will present this tomorrow morning at 11.30 (room Rome)! doi.org/10.32942/X2K...
Seasonal biases in data collection cause conceptual gaps in animal ecology
doi.org
Turbidity, or cloudiness in water, is increasing worldwide due to human activity, but its effects on how #fish see their environment are not well understood. This #RSOS study tests how different types of #turbidity change light underwater: doi.org/10.1098/rsos...
I don’t know why this post doesn’t give his name, but it’s Jo Nagai. This is a true story. medium.com/@zehraanjum2...
How a 10-Year-Old Boy’s Butterfly Experiment Silently Rewrote What We Know About Memory
In the world of science, breakthroughs often come from state-of-the-art labs with million-dollar equipment. But sometimes, they begin in a…
medium.com
WHAT FRESH HELL IS THIS?!!!!@the13thpanther.bsky.social · last mo.
With the conference just a few days away, I thought it would be nice to create an #ISBE2026 attendees Starter Pack to help us connect more easily. If you’re attending and would like to be included, send me a message or reply below! go.bsky.app/CiXGqQ7
New paper! We simulated foraging trips of Northern gannets at Bass Rock to decipher what information individuals use to keep returning to the same foraging patches. Memory was the strongest driver, but it wasn't the whole story. 🧵👇 doi.org/10.1186/s404... 1/5
We are excited to announce that #Behaviour2027 (XXXIX International Ethological Congress) will be taking place in Vienna, Austria! We are looking forward to having you all join us next year from August 23-27. Please follow and share!
New paper: From Cohesion to Norms: How Animal Groups Come, Stay, and Function Together. doi.org/10.1111/eth.... @primatenzentrum.bsky.social, @ethoges.bsky.social, @sfb1528.bsky.social, @asab.org
No claws, no problem! #crabs #fieldwork
New paper is out! Disease is often seen as a cost of social life. But can it also shape how complex societies evolve? Here, we use mathematical models to study social immunity: collective disease defence in ants, termites, bees and other group-living insects. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
PNAS
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...
pnas.org
Our paper is out now! 🎉📝 We describe how we work to address barriers faced by students and early-career researchs in the animal behaviour field, through our mentorships and microgrants. We hope that this can inspire and provide practical resources for others hoping to do the same!
The animal behaviour collective: building confidence and breaking barriers through community
Despite increasing efforts to diversify the field of animal behaviour, systemic barriers continue to limit access and inclusion for researchers from h…
sciencedirect.com
🐚🫧🦀 Some snaps from recent fieldwork: the view from our field site back to St Andrews, some mating sea hares, and some members of Team Fish living their best life 🦀🫧🐚 @animalsdoingstuff.bsky.social
James Traniello and I, and Associate Editors of Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, have prepared editorials commemorating the semicentennial of Wilson's Sociobiology. Check it out! link.springer.com/article/10.1... and link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Sociobiology and the transformation of evolutionary behavioral biology - Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology
Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology -
link.springer.com
New paper - one for the headbangers! 🐳 🦑 🧪
Alecburslem@alecburslem.bsky.social · 5mo agoNew publication! 'Headbutting Behavior Between Sperm Whales Documented Using Unoccupied Aerial Vehicles' Out in @marinemammalogy.bsky.social in collaboration with @lrendell.bsky.social, @azwhlab.bsky.social and @asociaciontursiops.bsky.social. doi.org/10.1111/mms....
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 saw so many ragworms during fieldwork today, bright green for the breeding season! @animalsdoingstuff.bsky.social
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...
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
academic.oup.com
Happy #waspwednesday everyone! Here's the latest article from wasp HQ www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... In a nutshell - controlling crop pests using parasitoid wasps is evolutionarily resilient to resistance evolution in pests because parasitoids are cool #science #evolution #parasitoid
Resistance evolution in parasitoid biocontrol: understanding the rule, managing the exceptions
In contrast to chemical pest control, biological control (biocontrol) is generally considered evolutionarily stable, with pests rarely evolving resist…
sciencedirect.com
A new special issue in JEB tackles the important problem of animal sensory perception in a changing world. Includes a paper by Cait Newport and me, on the visual challenges that fish face when navigating journals.biologists.com/jeb/issue/22...
Volume 229 Issue Suppl_1 | Journal of Experimental Biology | The Company of Biologists
Journal of Experimental Biology (JEB) is the leading primary research journal in comparative physiology and biomechanics.
journals.biologists.com
