🦋 Butterfly wing patterns create motion illusions that protect them from predators! Our new study (8 years in the making) is out in Nature today doi.org/10.1038/s415... @grahancock.bsky.social @esbriolat.bsky.social @scienceanna.bsky.social @lauraakelley.bsky.social @uniexecec.bsky.social

🚨New paper🚨 Garden #spiders are everywhere right now—big, beautiful ladies, still in the hub of their 🕸️ But they are not just waiting, at night they also 💤! We found behavioral signatures of sleep in the wild. Out in #AnimalBehaviour w/ @mherberstein.bsky.social tinyurl.com/uznvv58y 🧵1/5

I'm so excited to finally see the special issue "Addressing Biases in Animal Behaviour" fully published: www.sciencedirect.com/special-issu.... Huge thanks to my brilliant co-editors @viveknityananda.bsky.social & @nicolakoyama.bsky.social. Special issue grew from @asab.org's 2024 Winter Meeting 🧵

Humaning.

Read my latest newsletter here! Where I talk a bit about my thesis projects, and what the future holds for me now, after graduation. maartjevandenderen.substack.com/p/long-overd...

Long Overdue

An update on my thesis and life after graduation

maartjevandenderen.substack.com

📢 JOB ALERT! 📢 I am recruiting a 30-month postdoc to work on modelling the vision of trilobites @hfspo.bsky.social ! If you like 3D data, fossils, and functional morphology, this is the one for you! 📆Deadline 27. Aug Pls contact me with any Qs and share widely! www.bristol.ac.uk/jobs/find/de...

💤 Tired from #ISBE2026???? No!! Just a bunch of people excited about #animal #sleep ;) Great to connect all the sleep people - and hope to see this group grow at future ISBEs 💤 Hope to see you all tomorrow morning! @nityamohanty.bsky.social @nadjageiger.bsky.social @justmathieu.bsky.social

So excited for day 1! #ISBE2026 🥰

Great advice for an academic jobs as well! Rejection and criticism is constant but it helps to remind yourself "That’s what I do, that’s not what I am".

Daniel Benneworth-Gray@danielgray.com · 3mo ago

Sam Neill on tackling depression and imposter syndrome when you’re between jobs.

We do an awful lot of looooong video recordings in our lab and have long wanted an easy way to clip, compress and combine videos for our workflows. So here's #croppy! 🦀 I hope others will find it useful too - I'd love to hear if you do! And would appreciate if you give it a star on Github! 🌟

Daniela Rößler@roesslerdaniela.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Our postdoc @roald-arboel.com made a thing! #Croppy is #free and awesome for fast and effective #video #editing and it has a #GUI! Need to crop a part of a video? Need to trim a video? Need to combine videos? Need to compress a video? roald-arboel.com/croppy/

ctSpyderFields: A Python package for visual field reconstruction in spiders https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.05.28.728173v1

Our postdoc @roald-arboel.com made a thing! #Croppy is #free and awesome for fast and effective #video #editing and it has a #GUI! Need to crop a part of a video? Need to trim a video? Need to combine videos? Need to compress a video? roald-arboel.com/croppy/

Really excited to share that my first PhD chapter is now out in @currentbiology.bsky.social! 🕷️👀 We show that visually hunting spiders have repeatedly evolved forward-facing eyes, highlighting the remarkable evolutionary flexibility of their modular visual system. doi.org/10.1016/j.cu...

Hunting ecology predicts eye arrangements in the modular visual system of spiders

Pande et al. show that visually hunting spiders have convergently evolved forward-facing eyes. The positions and orientations of the eyes show the greatest morphological disparity and fastest evolutio...

cell.com

Beyond proud of @atal-pande.bsky.social, whose first PhD chapter is out now in @currentbiology.bsky.social! Atal shows that spiders that use their vision to hunt have convergently evolved similar eye arrangements, which imply lots of resampling of frontal space www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Hunting ecology predicts eye arrangements in the modular visual system of spiders

Vision is one of the most important senses used by animals and contributes to fundamental behaviors, including foraging, navigation, and mate detectio…

sciencedirect.com

Spider running performance varies enormously. We joined forces with David Labonte's Evolutionary Biomechanics lab in London for the broadest spider speed assay so far: 258 spp / 139 families Preprint: doi.org/10.64898/202... Press coverage by the New Scientist: www.newscientist.com/article/2532...

The world's fastest spider tops 3.5 metres per second

The most comprehensive database ever compiled of how fast arachnids can run has shown how leg anatomy and evolutionary history influence spiders’ running speed

newscientist.com

Please spread this talented and wonderful human’s name and work. Maartje @maartjevandenderen.bsky.social just finished her Scientific Illustration Master and is leaping into freelancing next. Got 💰 and #illustration needs? Look no further!! www.maartjevandenderen.nl

Maartje van Denderen

Maartje van Denderen is a Scientific Illustrator, interested in insects, mushrooms, and plants.

maartjevandenderen.nl

Daniela Rößler@roesslerdaniela.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Massive congrats to @maartjevandenderen.bsky.social for defending her fantastic thesis! 🥳 Maartje did her scientific illustration thesis with us on #spider #sleep @sleeblab.bsky.social Super cool experience & a pleasure to advise her. 👀 to hire an #illustrator >>> 💻 📞 Maartje!!! Colored pencil 🤯:

Massive congrats to @maartjevandenderen.bsky.social for defending her fantastic thesis! 🥳 Maartje did her scientific illustration thesis with us on #spider #sleep @sleeblab.bsky.social Super cool experience & a pleasure to advise her. 👀 to hire an #illustrator >>> 💻 📞 Maartje!!! Colored pencil 🤯:

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!

Off to the caves! We’re finally back in the field: filming sleepy cave spiders! 🕷️🕸️ Let’s see what we find! #fieldwork #animalsleep #caves @roald-arboel.com @nadjageiger.bsky.social @roesslerdaniela.bsky.social @unibonn.bsky.social

New paper alert!🕷️✨ Tiny spider. Shiny abdomen. Suspiciously wiggly bum. In our new study, we asked what abdomen bobbing in this jumping spider is really all about: Cute? Yes. Meaningful? Let’s find out...! [1/8] @unibonn.bsky.social link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00265-026-03745-1

🧵 Summary thread on our latest #spider #research. No time to read the #study ? But dying to know why spiders may twerk? This is for you: 🧵

Nadja Geiger@nadjageiger.bsky.social · 4mo ago

New paper alert!🕷️✨ Tiny spider. Shiny abdomen. Suspiciously wiggly bum. In our new study, we asked what abdomen bobbing in this jumping spider is really all about: Cute? Yes. Meaningful? Let’s find out...! [1/8] @unibonn.bsky.social link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00265-026-03745-1

🚨 TWERK ALERT 🚨 New publication from @sleeblab.bsky.social ! This was a very fun project to write up, co-lead by @nadjageiger.bsky.social and Chiara Hirschkorn. If you are interested why these spiders might bob their abdomen: link.springer.com/article/10.1... (Short thread following soon)

I still love the theory a Year 6 child proposed to me that David Attenborough is actually God and he got fed up with people not noticing the amazing things he'd created, so he made documentaries to show off.

zoologie.uni-greifswald.de/en/organizat... We have an open PhD position in my group for someone interested in functional morphology, biology of reproduction and evolutionary biology. Please spread the word!🧪🕷🧪🕷🧪🕷🧪

I love this piece. Animals are so totally worth spending your life obsessing over and kids know that best :)

The Author, Séamas O'Reilly@seamas.bsky.social · 6mo ago

A trip to the zoo reaffirms my love for animals, and of making children know every single thing they can about them, for reasons never sufficiently explained. www.irishtimes.com/life-style/p...

Don't forget about this excellent opportunity to share your joy and story-telling passion with younger generations! Expressions of interest are due on April 30th: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Using an online game with human 'predators' we test if toxic butterflies are more conspicuous: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Are Toxic Butterflies More Easily Detected by Human ‘Predators’?

Aposematic signals are often thought to be conspicuous and stable across environments. Yet, butterflies can have distinct colours on their dorsal and ventral sides which contradict this prediction. W...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Fantastic! An eyeless, short-winged, cave-inhabiting spider wasp (Pompilidae), from Nullarbor, Australia! doi.org/10.1111/aen.... Fun side note - Nullarbor is the perfect deadpan name for a treeless region. (I described a beetle, Chlamydopsis nullarbor, from the region long ago.)

3-year Independent Post-doc in Animal Behavior based at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama! Three positions, each including salary & a research budget. Applications due April, 15th. DM if you are interesting in developing a project with us! stri.si.edu/academic-pro...