Wayne Maddison (waynemaddison.bsky.social), professor emeritus at UBC, captured this video of a nearly transparent jumping spider (tribe Amycini) from Canandé Reserve, Ecuador.

Look closely & you'll see the principal eyes moving as it scans the area visually.

Let's talk about spider-vision! 🕷️🧪

🚨PhD opportunity🚨

🪲Deep-red vision and infrared sensing in jewel beetles 🪲

Understand how jewel beetles detect and integrate deep-red light and heat information to drive behaviour.

Location: La Trobe University, Bundoora

Contact: a.franklin@latrobe.edu.au; www.amanda-franklin.com

We’re off to Sydney for this year’s AES Conference! We are looking for symposium leads to help shape the program. Submit your proposals to aes2026@mq.edu.au by April 30!

Awesome! Congratulations Lauren

Which ant was your favorite? 🐜 Let us know in the comments. ⬇️

Dr. Julian Katzke walked us through how the Antscan project created 3D scans of over 2,000 ants from over 700 species. Using X-rays, these scans reveal the tiniest details, from leg hairs to even their internal anatomy.

We encourage ECRs and MCRs to host symposia. Looking forward to a great diversity of symposia topics to showcase Australian insects.

Though its a Entomology conference, we are inclusive of all arthropods! 🐜🕷️🐛🪲🦟🐝🦋

@austentsoc.bsky.social
@animbehav.bsky.social
@ausevosoc.bsky.social

Call for symposia for 2026 Australian Entomology Society Conference. Submit proposals before April 30.

Delighted to announce that the 2026 Australian Entomology Society Conference will be at the Wallumattagal Campus, Macquarie University, Sydney from December 7-10. See attached flyer on how to submit a symposium proposal.

Associate Lecturer in Plant Ecology PRIMARY DETAIL - Salary package: $123,435 FTE (Level B.1) plus 17% employer's superannuation contribution and annual leave loading. - Full-time- 35 hours per week, fixed term for 36 months - Based at ...

Exciting position at The School of Natural Sciences at Macquarie University.

We are looking for an Associate Lecturer in Plant Ecology.

A great opportunity to teach, mentor students and contribute to plant ecology research on the Wallumattagal Campus in Sydney.

⭐ASSAB 2026 Plenary Speakers⭐

🐝Prof. Andrew Barron: Why the honey bee is smarter than ChatGPT

🐦🐿️Assoc. Prof. Kristal Cain:
Chasing birds and shiny squirrels - an alternative path in academia

🪲Dr Kawsar Khan
Behaviour ecology in the Anthropocene

🐟Dr Upama Aich
Sex and stress in a changing world

Estimating global bee species richness and taxonomic gaps - Nature Communications Bees are crucial for the maintenance of healthy ecosystems, yet rigorous estimates of their species’ richness are lacking. This study estimates taxonomic gaps for bees around the world and provides a ...

New paper alert! "Estimating global bee species richness and taxonomic gaps" suggests that we have thousands of bee species left to describe and decades of taxonomic work ahead of us. We also provide the methods needed to apply more broadly :)
doi.org/10.1038/s414...

Looks terrific!!

Macro Highlights – The Best of 2025 - Macro Photography by Nicky Bay After years of trudging through forests and peering into the hidden lives of tiny creatures, the number of lifers I get should rightfully decline but 2025 proved to be remarkably defiant. This year de...

Please take some time to look through some of the discoveries photographed in 2025. It should interest some invertebrate enthusiasts. yes? yes?

bit.ly/nickybay2025

🚨SAVE THE DATE ASSAB 2026🚨
The ASSAB 2026 conference will be held in Adelaide in 2026!
Keep an eye out on the ASSAB website and social media for more information! We will see you there!

Great news - Many congratulations Jay!

Honored to announce the Hamilton Lecture 2026!

Leigh Simmons, Emeritus Professor of Evolutionary Biology at the University of Western Australia has made an outstanding contribution to the field of sexual selection acting from the whole organism to its gametes, and to our Society.

Incredibly honored and utterly excited to have been asked to give a plenary at @isbe2026.bsky.social hope to see you in Turin! #ISBE2026 #sleep #behavior

The cognitive ecology of wild bumblebees

New #PhD ad alert!
Interested in wild #bee #cognition and #brains in different #bumblebees? Want to live in #Newcastle and the beautiful north-east of England?

Check out this project with me, @lenariab.bsky.social and Sarah Scott. Contact me for further information.

iapetus.ac.uk/studentships...

Understanding the mechanism of facilitation in hoverfly TSDNs Author summary Many human sports, including tennis, football, and basketball, rely on the ability to visually detect and respond to the motion of a small, rapidly moving object. Indeed, some sports st...

In insects, motion processing is affected by background motion in Target Selective Descending neurons but not in presynaptic Small Target Motion Detectors. To explain this change, @puh23.bsky.social et al. examined three candidate TSDN circuit models. journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

Social media postcard that says: Are you an early-career researcher within five years of your first appointment to a faculty position? You could be eligible for our new grants for junior faculty staff. The Journal of Experimental Biology logo is in the bottom left corner. The Kickstart grant logo, two hands shaking, is in the bottom right corner.

The next deadline for ECRs, within 5 years of their first faculty position, to apply for JEB's next round of Kickstart Travel Grants and ECR Visiting Fellowships is 28 November, so don't miss the chance to apply for helpful funding

biologists.com/grants/#jeb

New preprint from the lab: A reference brain for the clonal raider ant.
With this resource, which is based on 40 individual brains, you can register and compare all kinds of samples in a common space. It comes with lots of detailed protocols and a user-friendly GUI.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Congratulations @laurensr.bsky.social 🎉🎉

Heliconinii butterflies display flight behaviours reminiscent of orientation flights when using new floral sources Despite their small brains, many insects form long-term memories of the spatial distribution of resources. To support this, some species display ‘orientation’ flights to increase capture of landscape ...

Protein-rich flowers are spatially scattered food sources for Heliconinii 🦋. This requires a sophisticated spatial memory. @ebablab.bsky.social et al. monitors the flight behavior when 🦋 encounter novel 🌺 and compare this behavior with other 🦋 species.
journals.biologists.com/jeb/article/...

Before the brink: considering sublethal impacts of climate change on stingless bee flight performance Vulnerability to climate change is often predicted using species critical thermal limits (CTMAX), the temperature at which an organism experiences a l…

Sublethal impacts of climate change on stingless bees, check out our hot off the press publication in @thermal-biology.bsky.social 🔥

How is flight speed impacted by changes in temperature? We tested #TPCs in an arid and subtropical bee 🐝 @pipilika.bsky.social

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

OIST is seeking up to four tenure-track or tenured faculty in Ecology, Environmental Science, Earth Science, and Oceanography. Application deadline: Oct 15. Please share. Thx!
www.oist.jp/careers/facu...

Male CNS Connectome A team of researchers has unveiled the complete connectome of a male fruit fly central nervous system —a seamless map of all the neurons in the brain and nerve cord of a single male fruit fly and the ...

Exciting news for #drosophila #connectomics and #neuroscience enthusiasts: the Drosophila male central nervous system connectome is now live for exploration. Find out more at the landing page hosted by our Janelia FlyEM collaborators www.janelia.org/project-team....

5/ Some wings have evolved strategies to help reduce damage resulting from collisions. For example, we learned a few years ago that wasp wings have a flexible joint that acts like a reversible crumple zone, allowing the wing tip to easily bend out of the way when it hits things...

Meet Chrissie Painting the new ASSAB president!

@cpaintingnz.bsky.social is a Senior Lecturer and behavioural ecologist at the University of Waikato. Her research seeks patterns in animal behaviour and morphology, with a particular focus on insect and arachnid mating systems.
🪰🕷️🪳

Awards — The Entomological Society of Victoria To perpetuate the memory of the late John Cecil Le Souëf, an esteemed member of the Entomological Society of Victora who died in 1982, the Society proudly offers the Le Souëf Awards.

The Entomological Society of Victoria invites nominations for the Le Souef Memorial and Emerging Awards, closing 30 September 2025.

Nesting behaviour drives the evolution of heat tolerance and climate vulnerability in bees! Check out our pre-print on 95 species of Australian native bee across the latitudinal extent of Australia! 🐝 #nativebee #climateadaptation #heattolerance #plasticity #behaviour #bees #climatechange

One mother for two species via obligate cross-species cloning in ants - Nature In a case of obligate cross-species cloning, female ants of Messor ibericus need to clone males of Messor structor to obtain sperm for producing the worker caste, resulting in males from the same moth...

Look at this crazy thing!
www.nature.com/articles/s41...