Ajay Narendra
@pipilika.bsky.social
Professor of Neuroethology, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia
AES student members can apply for Student Conference Grants of up to $400 to attend the 57th Australian Entomological Society Conference, with grant applications closing 4 September and Phil Carne Prize applications closing 31 August. buff.ly/BBxLsvW buff.ly/AqByimo
The Phil Carne Prize
About the award
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Dear neuroethologists, please take Eric Warrant's plea seriously and become a member of our society @neuroethology.org. There are many advantages, e.g. 🧠 Eligibility for awards and prizes 🧠 Receive newsletter with news, fun facts and job ads 🧠 Right to vote and organise symposia #icn2026vancouver
New preprint! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Nearly a decade after starting the project, the first major results from our comparative connectomics work is online! Comparing the head direction circuits of the central complex in bees, ants and flies, recapitulating >300million years of evolution.
We had a fantastic opening ceremony today for the #ICN2026. We are thankful for all sponsors that make this meeting possible. Special thanks to @jexpbiol.bsky.social
Two tiny hydrozoan jellies talking to each other (Melicertum octocostatum, 5 mm). Kattegat, The North Sea.
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
📢 Heads-up: I'm currently finalising the job description for a 30-month postdoc modelling visual abilities in these very gorgeous and very dead creatures! If you're interested, please get in touch - anticipated start is late 2026/early 2027 and the project combines great colleagues in UK + S Korea!
Lauren Sumner-Rooney@laurensr.bsky.social · 4mo agoSo excited to have received an #HFSPResearchGrant to study trilobite eyes with Luke Parry @oxuniearthsci.bsky.social and Gil Ju Lee (Pusan National University)!🥳 I'll be recruiting a postdoc @bristolbiosci.bsky.social - if 3D data, optical modelling, and fossils tickle your interest, stay tuned!
Do you have a background in behavioural ecology and are you interested in doing a PhD in Australia? I’m looking for new grad students so check out our website (BobWongLab.org) or come find me in Torino at #ISBE2026. 🐟🐠
@austentsoc.bsky.social Abstract submission for AES2026 closes on July 31. Join us for the conference in Sydney.
Fiorella@fiorella.bsky.social · 4w agoThis is your periodic reminder that registration for the Australian Entomological Society conference is open and you should register!!! event.mq.edu.au/aes2026/regi... [obligatory pic to make you pay attention is from our conference logo - illustration by: www.linkedin.com/in/gunnar-tr... ]
This is your periodic reminder that registration for the Australian Entomological Society conference is open and you should register!!! event.mq.edu.au/aes2026/regi... [obligatory pic to make you pay attention is from our conference logo - illustration by: www.linkedin.com/in/gunnar-tr... ]
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
Looking to attend The 57th Australian Entomological Society Conference in Sydney this December? Don't forget that abstract submissions close at the end of this month, 31 July 2026! For more details visit:
Home - The 57th Australian Entomological Society Conference
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The ‘ballista spider’: Scientists discover a tiny spider that launches ants with 140 times the force of gravity | https://www.europesays.com/uk/1047433/ Deep in the rainforests of far north Queensland, Australia, scientists have discovered a tiny spider with an extraordinary…
The 'ballista spider': Scientists discover a tiny spider that launches ants with 140 times the force of gravity | - United Kingdom
Deep in the rainforests of far north Queensland, Australia, scientists have discovered a tiny spider with an extraordinary hunting strategy. Nicknamed the
europesays.com
The ballista spider only feeds on extremely fierce green tree ants – so it has evolved sophisticated tools to safely catch its prey.
This tiny Australian spider uses a high-powered web catapult to trap and eat aggressive ants
theconversation.com
This tiny Australian #spider builds a giant elastic catapult to catch ants, and guess who did all the #math? We named it the Ballista spider, after I listed all the existing medieval weapons I knew from all the videogames I played. The paper is out now in Current Biology: doi.org/10.1016/j.cu...
This link will take you to a page that’s not on LinkedIn
lnkd.in
Learn how the newly discovered ballista spider builds a durable snare specialized in trapping a single ant species. www.discovermagazine.com/australian-b...
Newly Discovered Australian Spider Species Uses a Spring-Loaded Trap to Snare Aggressive Ants
Learn how the newly discovered ballista spider builds a durable snare specialized in trapping a single ant species.
discovermagazine.com
A spider living in the rainforests of Queensland, Australia, builds a snare trap reminiscent of a Roman-era ballista weapon that it uses to catapult green tree ants into a web 30 centimetres above
New-to-science spider builds trap that flings ants into the air
A spider living in the rainforests of Queensland, Australia, builds a snare trap reminiscent of a Roman-era ballista weapon that it uses to catapult green tree ants into a web 30 centimetres above
newscientist.com
New spider discovered in Queensland uses 'ballista' web to trap prey
Newly discovered spider uses 'ballista' web to capture prey
A bizarre species of spider from the rainforests of Far North Queensland springs a nasty surprise.
abc.net.au
Congratulations to Rob Boddington of the University of Bristol & Anuja Joseph of Macquarie University for winning the 2nd and 3rd place prizes for the JEB sponsored Best Student Full Length Talk at #ASSAB2026
#ASSAB2026 Excellent talks & posters, great food & lovely company. Proud of the work presented by my group: Anuja Joseph, Vanessa Goncalves, @nikkichin.bsky.social @pranavjoshi8.bsky.social @m3d-biology.bsky.social @annaseibel.bsky.social Noelia Calderon @fiorella.bsky.social @animbehav.bsky.social
@nikkichin.bsky.social is our champion Masters student who took on a ambitious project studying hunting behaviour in sand wasps! Amazing work!
Fiorella@fiorella.bsky.social · last mo.Our brilliant student @nikkichin.bsky.social presented her work on Bembix moths and their crazy aerial predatory attacks at #assab2026 this week! So proud of her amazing work 😀
Excited to launch this today! If you know any Indigenous students in the Australasian region who are interested in Animal Behaviour, please encourage them (or nominate them) to join ASSAB for free 🐦 🐛 🐸 🐀 🪲 🐝 🐟 🦎 🐔
ASSAB@animbehav.bsky.social · 2mo agoIntroducing ASSAB's new Indigenous student membership support scheme! ASSAB is pleased to introduce a scheme granting free membership to Māori, Pacific Islander, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander undergraduate and postgraduate students. More info: www.assab.org/membership
It's been a fabulous few days at Flinders Uni in Adelaide for #ASSAB2026 One of the final talks of the conference by Caitlin Dwyer shows some of the amazing diversity of study animals presented on by Australasian animal behaviourists during the conference 🐦 🐛 🐟 🕷
The Australasian Society for the Study of Animal Behaviour has an Indigenous Student Membership Support Scheme. More info here: www.assab.org/index.cfm?mo... #assab2026 @animbehav.bsky.social 📸 artwork by Ginger Riley Munduwalawala
Curious about how native bees and wasps interact? Check out Liying Nikki Chin’s poster at #ASSAB2026
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!
Tired: Spinning a web and waiting for prey to get stuck Wired: Using your webbing like a net and tossing it at prey Inspired: Building a spring-loaded silk death trap that yeets ants directly into your web faster than a Formula One race car 🧪🕷️ My latest for @cnn.com www.cnn.com/2026/06/23/s...
Very excited to share our discovery of an engineering masterpiece from the Australian rainforest! In our latest paper in @currentbiology.bsky.social we report a hunting strategy in a spider, whose web outperforms every known biological catapult system.
