Congrats to Rockefeller's @tomaskay.bsky.social of @danielkronauer.bsky.social's lab, who has been named a 2026 Branco Weiss Fellow! Tomas investigates how cooperation and competition shape the evolution of animal societies, aiming to identify the traits that determine evolutionary success.

In The Scientist: @danielkronauer.bsky.social's lab identifies two evolutionary ancient neuropeptides in the ant brain that modulate parental behavior in opposite directions: One increases the tendency to nurse and be close to larvae, while the other promotes foraging.

Ancient Neuropeptides Shape Modern Ant Parental Care | The Scientist

​By repurposing ancient feeding signals, clonal raider ants coordinate brood care and foraging, offering new insights into the evolution of social behavior.

the-scientist.com

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

In an article published today, we show that ancient feeding-related neuropeptides have been repurposed to control brood care in clonal raider ants. Photo: Bart Zijlstra, UNIL /1

I keep thinking back to this worm snake. Found under a rock in the back garden of an Air bnb during recent a fire ant collection trip to Athens, Georgia. They have extremely limited vision - check the rudimentary eyes - and a diet of 100% worm

Apply for a PhD position in the Pan lab @miyapan.bsky.social at MPI Biology 🇩🇪 to study the molecular mechanisms and evolution of sex determination in haplodiploid insects 🐜🐝.

Excited to share that I’m starting a research group at MPI for Biology Tübingen — and we’re recruiting PhD students! We are offering two fully funded PhD positions on sex determination and development in Hymenoptera 🐜🐝. Please share with prospective students who might be interested.

MPI for Biology Tübingen & Friedrich Miescher Laboratory@mpi-bio-fml.bsky.social · 8mo ago

🚀 Ready to explore life science research at the highest level? Then apply for a fully-funded biology #PhD position at the Max Planck Institute for Biology @mpi-bio-fml.bsky.social and Friedrich Miescher Laboratory! Find out about the projects you could be working on: www.phd.tuebingen.mpg.de #IMPRS

Excited about the prospect of being able to automatically annotate ant behaviour without going via pose estimation, which struggles in the situations we care most about

Jacopo Razzauti@jacoporazzauti.bsky.social · 9mo ago

Our preprint is out! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Peter Skovorodnikov and I are excited to present FERAL: a new video-understanding toolkit that maps raw video directly to behavior, no pose estimation required. It works across species, from lab to field, and even in collective systems. (🧵1/n)

New article from the lab out today, in which we discuss how social behavior evolves at the molecular level. From parenting across the animal tree of life to caste systems in social insects, it’s all connected (and, therefore, slowly starts to make sense)…

Tomas Kay@tomaskay.bsky.social · 9mo ago

Parental care, and more complex cooperative systems of care, have independently evolved in hundreds of animal lineages. In an article published today, we explore how these behaviors evolve 𝘢𝘵 𝘢 𝘮𝘰𝘭𝘦𝘤𝘶𝘭𝘢𝘳 𝘭𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘭l shorturl.at/g5OPw /1

Parental care, and more complex cooperative systems of care, have independently evolved in hundreds of animal lineages. In an article published today, we explore how these behaviors evolve 𝘢𝘵 𝘢 𝘮𝘰𝘭𝘦𝘤𝘶𝘭𝘢𝘳 𝘭𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘭l shorturl.at/g5OPw /1

Convergent evolution of a conserved molecular network underlies parenting and sociality - Nature Reviews Genetics

Kay et al. review evidence that parental care, and more complex social behaviour based on parental care, evolved in multiple species through the repeated co-option of members of a pleiotropic molecula...

shorturl.at

What does mating look like when you only have a single shot at getting it right? Very excited to share our work on an almost-invisible female control, rapidly evolving mating recognition systems, and species that break the rules and take over the world. IN MOSQUITOES>

@AntCommunity 🐜 🐜 Chengyuan Liu found a Camponotus ant colony where all sexual larvae have red spots of various sizes, but worker larvae don’t. Any idea what this is?🤔 Video in the comment.

Playing hide-and-seek with saltmarsh sparrows at Plumb beach: This East coast endemic inhabits coastal salt marshes and is endangered by habitat loss

These two mourning geckos looked like they were mating outside my hotel room in Gamboa, Panama. They are both female. The mourning gecko is an all female species that engages in pseudo-copulation to stimulate egg laying. Not sure I’ve knowingly seen female-female mounting before.

A 𝘾𝙚𝙥𝙝𝙖𝙡𝙤𝙩𝙚𝙨 𝙖𝙩𝙧𝙖𝙩𝙪𝙨 worker with a strepsipteran parasite in its abdomen. Male strepsipterans look like normal insects but females are neotenic, retaining larval form throughout their lives. Females implant themselves into the abdomens of other insects & expose their anterior tip /1

(1) A moulting Cicada. (2) Moulding is a vulnerable moment - a moulting cicada getting eaten alive by big-headed ants. And (3) aduldhood also dangerous! A cicada in the mouth of a broad-billed motmot. Over the past few days in Panama.

Central Park is full of active Robin's nests at the moment. This one is at eye-level on the North side of the Pool @birdcpk.bsky.social

An American oystercatcher feeding its chick today at Rockaway beach, NY.

No kiss required to turn this pickerel frog into a prince. Catskills, NY.

What a snake!

Daniel Kronauer@danielkronauer.bsky.social · last yr.

A highlight from today’s walk at Onteora Lake in the Catskills with @pbrand.bsky.social and @tomaskay.bsky.social was this Eastern Copperhead (Agkistrodon contortrix), one of the few venomous snakes in New York. They are very well camouflaged and tend not to move, so are hard to spot.

One of two wrentits rehydrating at a dripping pipe in Mission Trails, California. These are endemic to west coast scrubland, from Oregon south to Baja California, and are the only New World representative of the Parrotbills. They form lifelong pair bonds.

Pink-footed geese wintering in Norfolk, where they form flocks of thousands and feed on post-harvest sugar beet tops.