The Mara Hyena Project is running a plushie fundraiser! Adopt Waffles- Queen of Serena North Clan as a soft plushie! www.gimmeswag.com/products/waf...

Waffles, Queen of Serena North Clan

Why Support? Normally, we wouldn't recommend snuggling a hyena! Here is one you can! Take home one of the Mara Hyena Project's most famous hyenas AND support the research and conservation of spotted h...

gimmeswag.com

My takeaway from #co32026: "Nothing in cognition makes sense except in the light of adaptive function."

Hmm that link seems to be broken. Here is another! www.cell.com/current-biol...

Genes and gene networks underlying spatial cognition in food-caching chickadees

Mountain chickadees rely on specialized memory for recovering cached food sources, and variation in this trait has strong effects on fitness. Semenov et al. identify genes and gene networks underlying...

cell.com

I was just forwarded communications from Duke admins that this is true: one of the largest and most active herbaria in the United States is being closed in the middle of an extinction crisis, because Duke leadership does not wish to support the infrastructure costs.

Fay-Wei Li@fernway.bsky.social · 2y ago

sad news - Duke University decided to dump their herbarium, which has over 800,000 plant specimens, one of the largest among in America, and includes many type specimens of Lady Gaga ferns. What a shame. Please stop Duke admins for making this horrible mistake!!

New publication on maternal care by cougars and the influence it has on kitten survival rates! TLDR: more experience + more care = better kitten survival. Details @ www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... 🧪

The European Conference on Behavioural Biology will be hosted by the Animal Behaviour group at the University of Zurich. Abstracts opened today! Visit www.ecbb.uzh.ch for all the details.

🚀 🎉 🚀 Applications for the 2024 Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI) are now open!! Interested in intelligence, mind, and cognition in all its forms? Scholars from any discipline—and storytellers in any medium—are encouraged to apply! disi.org

My lab at University of Alaska Fairbanks is recruiting an NSF-funded postdoc to study the evolution of ice-binding proteins in intertidal species. Field and labwork in beautiful places! 2 years of support at $67K/yr. Applications accepted until 3/16. Please share! careers.alaska.edu/en-us/job/52...

Here's the winning story: www.allaboutbirds.org/news/harsh-m.... Now off to rewrite the bio I use for everything to start out "Rebecca Heisman is an award-winning science writer..."

Harsh Mountain Winters Have Made Chickadees Smarter

A decade of research has revealed how the cognitive abilities of chickadees are shaped by their surroundings. Now scientists have begun to peer inside the black box of genetics, uncovering the variati...

allaboutbirds.org

New article out on curiosity in meerkats and other mongooses (and how habituation towards humans affects multiple aspects of exploration in contrasting ways).

Advancing the comparative study of behavior

animalbehaviorandcognition.org

As jobs are coming out and folks are applying, here's your regular reminder of lots of examples of successful job apps (mostly research academia but also industry, PUI, gov). And if you've gotten a job recently, please consider contributing! github.com/RILAB/statem...

I described these estimates last week in my intro lecture for the human evolution core course at my institute. Surprises a lot of ppl. And odd for a primate to be ~half mammal biomass, given how insignificant other primates are. More bat biomass than non-human primate. Humans are weed monkeys.

Matthew Freeman@mjafreeman.bsky.social · 3y ago

OK this is the mind-blowing image of the week for me: the total global biomass of mammals. Wild animals are a tiny proportion. From a paper by Ron Milo Lab at Weizmann Institute, via a great Oxford lecture by @marionkoopmans.bsky.social www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

New publication on the use of parametric speakers (such as the SoundLazer) for animal communication studies.