Judith A.H. Smit

@judithsmit.bsky.social

NOMIS-STRI postdoc | Animal communication in changing environments | Treehoppers & Frogs | #AnimalBehavior #Ecology #Evolution | 🇳🇱 in 🇵🇦 | she/her

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

PhD position open 🚨 We are seeking a talented, enthusiastic, and collaborative PhD candidate to investigate how seasonal environmental change influences population vulnerability and to develop new indicators of demographic risk and resilience in wild bird populations. nioo.knaw.nl/en/vacancies...

PhD position: Indicators of demographic risk and resilience in wild birds

We are seeking a talented, enthusiastic, and collaborative PhD candidate to investigate how seasonal environmental change influences population vulnerability and to develop new indicators of demograph...

nioo.knaw.nl

Super excited about this new paper! and eternally grateful to the amazing coauthors, the wonderful network of colleagues who gave us stimuli, and all of the thousands of people that listened to animal sounds for us!

samuel mehr@mehr.nz · 5mo ago

out now in Science: @loganjames.bsky.social collected pairs of sounds in 16 species where we *know* which sound is more attractive (to that species) he played them to ppl on themusiclab.org, asking, in each pair, which was nicer. humans agreed w other animals doi.org/10.1126/science.aea1202

cOMPaRatiVe cOGNitiONHumans share acousticpreferences with other animalsLogan S. James1,2,3,4* Sarah C. Woolley 1,2, Jon T. Sakata1,2,Courtney B. Hilton5,6, Michael J. Ryan3,4, Samuel A. Mehr5,7,8Many animals produce courtship sounds, and receivers prefersome sounds over others. Shared ancestry and convergentevolution may generate similarities in preference across speciesand underlie Darwin’s conjecture that some animals “havenearly the same taste for the beautiful as we have.” In this study,we show that humans share acoustic preferences with a rangeof animals, that the strength of human preferences correlateswith that in other animals, and that humans respond fasterwhen in agreement with animals. Furthermore, we foundgreatest agreement in preference for adorned, ancestral, andlower-frequency sounds. humans’ music listening experiencewas associated with preferences. These results are consistentwith theories arguing that biases in processing sculpt acousticpreferences, and they confirm Darwin’s century-old hunchabout the conservation of aesthetics in nature

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