Tessera

Lara S. Burchardt

@lsburchardt.bsky.social

Behavioural Biologist at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin| Rhythm and Beat Precision in Acoustic Communication and Other Systems | PhD from MfN Berlin and Free University Berlin | coding in R | she/her

59 Posts574 Follower 189 Folgt

ASAB @asab.org · 2mo ago

There are four positions to join ASAB council beginning 2027: Ordinary Member, Membership Secretary, Communications Officer and Social Media Officer. Statements and nominations are due June 20! www.asab.org/opportunities

Opportunities — ASAB

asab.org

AU Bioacoustics @bioacousticsau.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Novel insights on #spermwhale communication 🐋🔈: Male Sperm Whales may use slow clicks to maintain information over extreme distances, and these long-range signals may offer honest advertisement through slow-rhythm-keeping to distant receivers. #marinebioacoustics doi.org/10.1111/nyas...

ASAB @asab.org · 3mo ago

🐤Yellowhammers! 🎶Birdsong! 💃Individuality! 🥁Rhythm! Our #EditorsChoice for the #AnimalBehaviourJournal: “Yellowhammer males sing using individual isochronous rhythms and maximize rhythmic dissimilarity with neighbours” Read here: doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2026.123552

Screenshot of article:
Animal Behaviour
Volume 235, May 2026, 123552
Yellowhammer males sing using individual isochronous rhythms and maximize rhythmic dissimilarity with neighbours
Anna N. Osiecka, Marcos Q. Oliva, Jan Kouřil, Tereza Petrusková, Lara S. Burchardt

Lara S. Burchardt @lsburchardt.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Huge congrats @ahanaaurora.bsky.social! So very well deserved! 🎉🎉🎉🦇🦇🦇

European Conference on Behavioural Biology@ecbb2026.bsky.social · 4mo ago

We are delighted to announce that the 2026 Tinbergen Prize Winner (@ethoges.bsky.social) @ahanaaurora.bsky.social is joining our list of plenary speakers for #ECBB2026.

European Conference on Behavioural Biology @ecbb2026.bsky.social · 4mo ago

We are delighted to announce that the 2026 Tinbergen Prize Winner (@ethoges.bsky.social) @ahanaaurora.bsky.social is joining our list of plenary speakers for #ECBB2026.

ECBB 2026
Tinbergen Prize winner

Left image: Dr Ahana Aurora Fernandez
Lower left: Dr Ahana Aurora Fernandez, University of Münster

Right side text: vocal communication in bats and hummingbirds

understand the mechanisms underlying vocal ontogeny and learning, and how factors such as the social environment shape these processes

how acoustic input and social interactions shape the success of vocal learning

long-term field study of wild bats in Panama

Bottom text: 1-4 September 2026 | Anglia Ruskin University

European Conference on Behavioural Biology@ecbb2026.bsky.social · 8mo ago

Missed our #ECBB2026 Plenary Speaker reveals? Not to worry! Here is a quick recap of all the excellent speakers we'll be welcoming at September's meeting!

Top text: ECBB 2026 Plenary Speakers

(Left) Image of Prof Laurent Brent, University of Exeter
(Centre) Image of Prof Tim Caro, University of Bristol
(Right) Image of Prof Mariella Herberstein, Leibnez Institute for the Analysis of Biodiversity Change

Bottom text: 1 - 4 September 2026, Anglia Ruskin University

Ahana Aurora Fernandez @ahanaaurora.bsky.social · 4mo ago

📌Save the date: from 30.09-02.10.2026 the Joint Graduate Meeting in Animal Behaviour will take place @uni-muenster.de, sponsored by @ethoges.bsky.social and the DZG. No registration fees🤗 Take the chance, visit Münster, present your research, build and grow your peer network. More information soon

Lara S. Burchardt @lsburchardt.bsky.social · 4mo ago

🔊🎶New paper out on rhythm in animal communication. Rhythm carries individual information in male yellowhammers. Check it out 🐤🐦‍⬛ #informationcoding #bioacoustics #rhythm #yellowhammer

Anna N Osiecka 🍉@aosiecka.bsky.social · 4mo ago

🔊Out now with @lsburchardt.bsky.social @marcosqoliva.bsky.social, Kouřil & Petrusková: Yellowhammer males sing using individual isochronous rhythms & maximise rhythmic dissimilarity with their neighbours. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Stephanie L King @stephanielking.bsky.social · 4mo ago

New OA paper @royalsocietypublishing.org: What can we learn from bonobos and bottlenose dolphins about the evolution of between-group cooperation? royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article... Lovely collab with @lirsamuni.bsky.social Martin Surbeck and Richard Connor.

Anna N Osiecka 🍉@aosiecka.bsky.social · 4mo ago

New work from myself, @kasiawojczulanis.bsky.social @lsburchardt.bsky.social : seabird calls share not only efficiency universals, but also prosodic patterns with our speech. Rallentando rhythms carry info absent in spectra. 🔊🐧 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Stephanie L King @stephanielking.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Fantastic opportunity to work with us at Shark Bay Dolphin Research 👇🏻

EvolDir@evoldir.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Two PhD positions in dolphin genomics and behavioral ecology are available at the University of Zurich, starting May/June 2026. Applicants must have relevant degrees and experience. More info: www.michaelkruetzenlab.org. #phd

Henkjan Honing @musiccognition.bsky.social · 6mo ago

‘If musicality did not arise from language, where did it come from?’ New preprint, Curr. Biol. In press. : doi.org/10.31234/osf...

Lara S. Burchardt @lsburchardt.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Paper Out in #NYAS: Using Rhythmic Notation and Musical Analysis on Animal Communication: A Case Study on Sperm Whales🔊🐳 doi.org/10.1111/nyas... We use Western music notation to transcribe sperm whale codas. What can we learn about them using musical analysis🎼🎶?

Graphic explaining the process to annotate sperm whale codas in western music notation. Step 1: Graphic of a person with headphones, listening. Step 2: A Spektrogram, showing sound amplitude over time, with four sperm whale clicks and three musical beats as red line. Step 3: Western Musical Notation, a 3/4 rhythm, four notes are shown.

Tay (Antonio J. Osuna Mascaró)@biotay.bsky.social · 7mo ago

I have prepared a video summarizing the study. Please come back here after reading the thread : ) youtu.be/bAk4PFEuWKQ English also youtu.be/CETjjZBMT5c Spanish youtu.be/tkpjlCxDJZA German (Thanks to Esau Dharma for providing the Spanish voice for Witgar Wiegele!)

Flexible use of a multi-purpose tool by a cow

YouTube video by Antonio Jose Osuna Mascaró

youtu.be

Tay (Antonio J. Osuna Mascaró)@biotay.bsky.social · 7mo ago

Cow Tools! We have lived alongside cows for nearly 10,000 years. We breed them and exploit them It is now, only now, that we have discovered THEY CAN USE TOOLS Here I describe our study (paper) www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... in @currentbiology.bsky.social with @auersperga.bsky.social

European Conference on Behavioural Biology @ecbb2026.bsky.social · 7mo ago

We know you don't want to start your year by forgetting to submit a symposia proposal before the 31 January deadline. www.aru.ac.uk/science-and-... #academicsky #ecbb2026

Right side: A group of meerkats representing the researchers that submitted a symposia proposal for ECBB 2026.
Left side: The sad, lonely meerkat representing the one that forgot. All by themself.

Submission deadline 31 January!

Mirjam Knörnschild @berlinbatlab.bsky.social · 7mo ago

New study alert! Sexually selected vocalizations of Greater Mouse-Eared Bats We recorded male Myotis myotis in mating roosts and found complex vocalizations with an individual signature and pronounced seasonal variation. Check it out! 🔗 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Claudia Wascher @wascherclaudia.bsky.social · 7mo ago

If you work on corvid ecology, behaviour, cognition, or conservation, this might be useful for you 👇 I’ve just published CORVIDATA in Scientific Data 🐦 doi.org/10.1038/s415... (1/4)

CORVIDATA: A global dataset of morphology, ecology, sociality, and life-history in Corvidae - Scientific Data

Scientific Data - CORVIDATA: A global dataset of morphology, ecology, sociality, and life-history in Corvidae

doi.org

Lara S. Burchardt @lsburchardt.bsky.social · 7mo ago

🚨Preprint doi.org/10.64898/202... From the start of studying #rhythm production in animal vocs, I was sure rhythms can code #population info. Now shown for the 1. time in tawny pipits 🐦🎉🔊 Just as exciting: Even in arrhythmic song, rhythm parameters prove to be valuable in describing the signal.

Unique rhythmic signatures in arrhythmic birdsong

Animal rhythms are gaining increasing attention in the studies of behaviour and musicology. Recently, it has been shown that rhythm itself can be used as an information coding channel. Now we ask: doe...

doi.org

Anna N Osiecka 🍉@aosiecka.bsky.social · 8mo ago

🔊Our last paper of the year: Unique rhythmic signatures in arrhythmic birdsong First evidence: rhythm analysis can reliably describe arrhythmic sequences. In tawny pipits, (ar)rhythmic differences are individual, and indicate singers' population of origin! doi.org/10.64898/202...

animal prattle @animal-prattle.bsky.social · 8mo ago

what's in a meow?? 🐈 New from @berlinbatlab.bsky.social! 1. "we examined meows and purrs to establish how individual identity is encoded" 2. stronger individual signature in purrs than in meows 3. domestic cat meows more variable than those of wild felids #bioacoustics #prattle 💬 #neuroskyence

Fig. 1. Spectrograms and oscillograms of (A) two meows and (B) two purrs. Oscillograms depict sound
pressure over time, and spectrograms depict frequency over time. All spectrograms were created with a
1024-point FFT, 16-bit depth, and a Hamming Window with 87.5% overlap (sampling rate: 96 kHz, frequency resolution: 94 Hz, time resolution: 1.33 ms). The two pictures on the right depict Koda, a 15-year-old male
Ragdoll cat, meowing and purring (credit: Marisa Idolo).

European Conference on Behavioural Biology @ecbb2026.bsky.social · last yr.

Save the date for the next European Conference on Behavioural Biology! Animal Behaviour in the Anthropocene, 1-4 September 2026 at Anglia Ruskin University. Watch this space for updates on speakers, plenaries, and calls for abstracts! #AcademicSky #UpcomingConferences

Save the date information for the upcoming European Conference on Behavioural Biology: Animal Behaviour in the Anthropocene. 1-4 September 2026 at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK.

Mark A. Hanson @hansonmark.bsky.social · 9mo ago

We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing: a 🧵 1/n Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820 Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/... Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...

A table showing profit margins of major publishers. A snippet of text related to this table is below.

1. The four-fold drain
1.1 Money
Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for
whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who
created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis,
which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024
alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit
margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher
(Elsevier) always over 37%.
Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most
consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial
difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor &
Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American
researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The
Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3
billion in that year.

A figure detailing the drain on researcher time.

1. The four-fold drain

1.2 Time
The number of papers published each year is growing faster than the scientific workforce,
with the number of papers per researcher almost doubling between 1996 and 2022 (Figure
1A). This reflects the fact that publishers’ commercial desire to publish (sell) more material
has aligned well with the competitive prestige culture in which publications help secure jobs,
grants, promotions, and awards. To the extent that this growth is driven by a pressure for
profit, rather than scholarly imperatives, it distorts the way researchers spend their time.
The publishing system depends on unpaid reviewer labour, estimated to be over 130 million
unpaid hours annually in 2020 alone (9). Researchers have complained about the demands of
peer-review for decades, but the scale of the problem is now worse, with editors reporting
widespread difficulties recruiting reviewers. The growth in publications involves not only the
authors’ time, but that of academic editors and reviewers who are dealing with so many
review demands.
Even more seriously, the imperative to produce ever more articles reshapes the nature of
scientific inquiry. Evidence across multiple fields shows that more papers result in
‘ossification’, not new ideas (10). It may seem paradoxical that more papers can slow
progress until one considers how it affects researchers’ time. While rewards remain tied to
volume, prestige, and impact of publications, researchers will be nudged away from riskier,
local, interdisciplinary, and long-term work. The result is a treadmill of constant activity with
limited progress whereas core scholarly practices – such as reading, reflecting and engaging
with others’ contributions – is de-prioritized. What looks like productivity often masks
intellectual exhaustion built on a demoralizing, narrowing scientific vision.

A table of profit margins across industries. The section of text related to this table is below:

1. The four-fold drain
1.1 Money
Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for
whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who
created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis,
which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024
alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit
margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher
(Elsevier) always over 37%.
Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most
consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial
difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor &
Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American
researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The
Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3
billion in that year.

The costs of inaction are plain: wasted public funds, lost researcher time, compromised
scientific integrity and eroded public trust. Today, the system rewards commercial publishers
first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour
resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge.

Lara S. Burchardt @lsburchardt.bsky.social · 9mo ago

Amazing opportunity to work with @stephanielking.bsky.social AND Dolphins 🐬

Stephanie L King@stephanielking.bsky.social · 9mo ago

3 year postdoc funded by @ukri.org NERC on between-group cooperation in the Shark Bay dolphins is now live - please share widely 🙏 www.bristol.ac.uk/jobs/find/de...

Auditory-Visual Speech Association (AVISA)@avsp.bsky.social · 9mo ago

A richly annotated dataset of co-speech hand gestures across diverse speaker contexts www.nature.com/articles/s41... Dataset comprising 2373 annotated gestures, 9 speakers across 3 distinct categories: University lecturers, Politicians, and Psychotherapists can be accessed at doi.org/10.17605/OSF...

A richly annotated dataset of co-speech hand gestures across diverse speaker contexts - Scientific Data

Scientific Data - A richly annotated dataset of co-speech hand gestures across diverse speaker contexts

nature.com

Jolyon Troscianko @jtroscianko.bsky.social · 9mo ago

BehaveAI is live! Our biologically inspired video analysis tool sees motion as colour. Track animals or objects, classify their behaviour, and handle complex natural scenes with ease. Semi-supervised annotation, no GPUs required, user-friendly, free & open source. Pre-print tinyurl.com/BehaveAI

Animal Behaviour Live @animalbehaviour.live · 9mo ago

Only 5 days left to register! ⏰ Don’t miss the chance to connect with animal behaviour researchers from around the world and discover the latest in behavioural science. 📅 13–14 November; free, online & open to all worldwide 🌍 🔗https://ablaoc25.sciencesconf.org/

Kelsey Tyssowski @kelseytea.bsky.social · 10mo ago

🧠🌟🐭 Excited to share some of my postdoc work on the evolution of dexterity! We compared deer mice evolved in forest vs prairie habitats. We found that forest mice have: (1) more corticospinal neurons (CSNs) (2) better hand dexterity (3) more dexterous climbing, which is linked to CSN number🧵

bioRxiv Neuroscience@biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social · 10mo ago

Evolutionary expansion of the corticospinal system is linked to dexterity in Peromyscus mice https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.16.682851v1

Animal Behaviour Live @animalbehaviour.live · 10mo ago

1️⃣ month to go! ⏰ #ABL2025, our annual international online conference is on the 13–14 Nov 🎉 6 plenaries • 24 talks • 40+ posters • 3 workshops • lively Discord chats.. and more ! 🌐 Free registration — register now! 👉 ablaoc25.sciencesconf.org

AU Bioacoustics @bioacousticsau.bsky.social · 10mo ago

Paper & incredible science alert: Our assistant professor @laurastidsholt.bsky.social & a passionate team @elena-tena.bsky.social @ebdonana.bsky.social found proof for greater nocturnal #bats 🦇 preying on migratory birds 🐦 AND devouring them in flight! #bioacoustics www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Marco Maiolini @marcomaiolini.bsky.social · 10mo ago

This year marks the 100th birthday of #bioacoustics, established by Ivan Regen in 1925, which studies how animals hear, produce and propagate sound. Let’s discover this discipline with @nicolasmathevon.bsky.social, Professor of Saint Etienne University, in the first episode of Acoustic World.

Hanna Kokko @kokkonut.bsky.social · 10mo ago

🚨🚨Job! 🚨🚨Permanent (75% time) job! We are a pretty awesome research group & seek a manager who deals with everything: personnel tasks, organizing retreats, preparing code for teaching / data structures for research... Fluency in German & English essential. stellenboerse.uni-mainz.de#/jgu/job/51527

stellenboerse.uni-mainz.de