A humble academic proposal: let's not have stars. Everyone hired as an academic at a university is there to teach younger generations, to make new knowledge, to have that knowledge critically evaluated by others, and to act on collective insights. We do not need to designate some people as stars.

Tom Collett’s new book “Insects and How They Navigate Their World” is out and seemingly the pdf is free 👀 (for me anyway) link.springer.com/book/10.1007...

Insects and How They Navigate Their World

Discover how insects navigate using vision, memory and cues from nature. A clear, engaging look at ants, bees, and the remarkable abilities of tiny brains.

link.springer.com

Our (with @plewin.bsky.social) @currentbiology.bsky.social Dispatches is out today (doi.org/10.1016/j.cu...). Covering two recent papers about bird eye movements during flight, using homing pigeons as model species.

Very happy to share our new review on visual computation in the cephalopod brain, with @vangeliqueallen.bsky.social, out now! We discuss exciting recent advances in understanding how the radically different brain of cephalopods processes the visual scene. 🐙🔬👀 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Last, but not least, James @jjfosterlab.bsky.social talks about "#Honeybees at high noon keep their #celestialcompass accurate" 🐝☀️ #ICN2026

Why do some deep-sea anglerfish males become permanent parasites? This #ProcB study finds that parasitic males evolve when mating opportunities are rare. doi.org/10.1098/rspb... | #Evolution #TheoreticalBiology

@jaystafstrom.bsky.social discovered that spiders that are actually adapted to a nocturnal lifestyle occassionally hunt during the day. 🕷 He is also looking for Phd students and postdocs. Apply if you want to learn more about the fascinating sensory world of spiders.

How do you "see" with electric eyes? How does collective behavior emerge from individual interactions? Nocturnal weakly electric fish evolved to do this, but studying naturalistic social behavior is very hard. Our solution? Virtual 'fish' 🤖🐟⚡ 📄 arxiv.org/abs/2511.08436

A new #ICN2026 day starts with a plenary funded by @jexpbiol.bsky.social: Dr. Lisa Fenk @fleyes.bsky.social presents their work on "Spontaneous and reflexive eyemovements in flies" 👀🪰 #insectvision #pseudopupil #Drosophila

Do insects show signs of "handiness"? @lochlanw.bsky.social studies lateralization in flying hawkmoths. He found proboscis, body, and visual lateralization. #ICN2026

NEWS! Our new paper in Current Biology shows that killer fly males employ aerial trickery to avoid being cannibalized by the females and achieve mating success. Think of a cheetah chasing a prey, the predator is faster, but the prey is more maneuverable.

First conference talk ✔️ thanks to @neuroethology.org for the opportunity and the Motor Control crowd for listening 🦋🦾

If an action results in error, each neuron requires an individualized teaching signal that guides change in its output. This is the credit assignment problem of learning. Are there neurons in the brain that can compute such a sophisticated teaching signal? Yes. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Climbing fibers encode the gradient of a loss function for the cerebellum

Neurons in the brain are often many synapses away from motoneurons, yet if a movement results in error, each distant neuron needs a teacher that considers its specific contribution to production of th...

biorxiv.org

Hummingbird hawkmoths show a form of "handedness": #UniKonstanz @cbehav.bsky.social researchers found that they preferentially place their proboscis on one side when searching for nectar. Full story: t1p.de/v09qd @insect-vision.bsky.social @anna-stoeckl.bsky.social @lochlanw.bsky.social

Excellent way to start the week #ICN2026 with a fascinating and entertaining talk by @samjakeengland.bsky.social ⚡️🐛

New preprint! What the eyes do when searching for a visual target reveals the psychological similarity between objects, just like more classic (but much longer & tedious) tasks like triplet odd-one-out and direct comparison. www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/... #BRAINFLOW @upcite.bsky.social @cnrs.fr

Eye movements reveal representational geometry

Mental representations are the explanatory construct of the cognitive sciences, but there is no widely accepted characterization of how they cause behavior. Visual representational geometry can be quantified by similarity scores, but almost all methods require an explicit judgment. To examine how representations cause behavior by varying task demands, observers must perform different tasks while continuously reporting similarity, leading to dual-task interference. This study develops scanpaths as an implicit similarity measure, and uses representational similarity analysis to validate it. Observers searched for a target; fixations on distractors may reveal similarity. Similarity was also quantified by an odd-one-out task in the same participants, and ratings from different participants (Jiang et al. 2022). Representational geometries between tasks correlated. A generative model predicted first fixations in novel data. This double validation of the scanpath method opens the door to examining the causality of representations by determining if and how they vary with task demands. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest.

biorxiv.org

Happy Monday! Come learn how jellyfish swim. In a review led by fluid dynamics maestro Alex Hoover, we outline how neuromechanical modeling will help us understand how modulation of neural activity allows jellyfish to jet and pirouette through fluids www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Our latest: Hummingbird and hawkmoth wing shape: Analyzing functional convergence in analogous structures, by Benton Walters @bristolpalaeo.bsky.social, with help from Yuming Liu, Iman Fadel @ferronhg.bsky.social @emilyrayfield.bsky.social and myself.

Hummingbird and Hawkmoth Wing Shape: Analyzing Functional Convergence in Analogous Structures

Synopsis. Similar wing planform shapes have independently evolved in both hummingbirds and hawkmoths, indicating convergence. Functional analysis of bird w

academic.oup.com

Olfactory Search Behavior Across Flow Regimes Supports a Unifying Framework https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.07.21.739673v1

1/ The world's songbirds sing in just 8 basic sounds. And where a bird lives decides which ones it uses. My first PhD paper is out now in @science.org (www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aee6239) Here is what we found:

New paper from the lab 🎉🚨 We found that hummingbird hawkmoths show lateralised proboscis control on both the sensory and motor sides. 🦋 How plastic is this lateralised visuo-motor axis when sensory input is perturbed? Find out more 👇

Lochlan W@lochlanw.bsky.social · 2w ago

🚨🦋 Thrilled to share my first PhD paper published in PNAS this week, in collaboration with Sören Kannegieser and @anna-stoeckl.bsky.social @insect-vision.bsky.social: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... We found hawkmoths use a convergent visual control strategy for appendage guidance. 👁️🫳 🧵 below.

🚨🦋 Thrilled to share my first PhD paper published in PNAS this week, in collaboration with Sören Kannegieser and @anna-stoeckl.bsky.social @insect-vision.bsky.social: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... We found hawkmoths use a convergent visual control strategy for appendage guidance. 👁️🫳 🧵 below.

🚨🦋 Thrilled to share my first PhD paper published in PNAS this week, in collaboration with Sören Kannegieser and @anna-stoeckl.bsky.social @insect-vision.bsky.social: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... We found hawkmoths use a convergent visual control strategy for appendage guidance. 👁️🫳 🧵 below.

Preparations are in full swing, and the excitement is building for our Lepidopteran Satellite Meeting @neuroethology.org #ICN2026 with @alexhaverkamp.bsky.social and Simon Sponberg 🦋🐛

Congratulations to Anupama @manel-a-pama.bsky.social, who won the Poster Prize at the annual biology Poster Session! She will also bring her poster to #ICN26 in Vancouver, so stay tuned 🦋🌸 @neuroethology.org

When people play a game requiring repetitive actions while distracted, they aren’t always aware of the actions they perform. A study using such a game hones in on the neural mechanisms that contribute to awareness of action. In PNAS Nexus: https://ow.ly/tApC50ZoapW

Ancient Egyptians deified the sacred baboon as a form of Thoth, god of the moon. #Dartmouth anthropology professor Nathaniel Dominy and Catherine Hobaiter of @uniofstandrews.bsky.social used spectroscopy to show its grizzled fur is indistinguishable from moonlight.

Kevin Ashton 🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈🇬🇱🇩🇰🇵🇸@kevinashton.bsky.social · 3w ago

Why baboons were a manifestation of the ancient Egyptian deity of wisdom, writing, magic, and the moon. This is an extraordinary work of synthesis, humanism, and science writing. Short, free, non-technical, fascinating, and a great weekend quick read.

Meet our Plenary Speaker Daniela Rößler Fueled by curiosity and a deep love of natural history Daniela discovered a REM-like sleep state in spiders and uses integrative field, lab and comparative approaches to investigate the function, ecology, and evolution of sleep across the spider tree of life.

out today! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Chaz Firestone@chazfirestone.bsky.social · last mo.

You press ‘send’ on a high-stakes email but hesitate when lifting your finger. You make a chess move but linger on the piece before letting go. Familiar? In @pnas.org, Hanbei Zhou @ruizhegoh.bsky.social @ianbphillips.bsky.social & I show that response *duration* tracks confidence! shorturl.at/A9NVe

The ecology of remembering and forgetting: quantity-quality trade-offs in the spatiotemporal memory of a forager https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.07.12.738111v1