Latest issue | The British Journal for the History of Science | Cambridge Core The British Journal for the History of Science

🎨 Colour, observation, and distance 🐦️

How did Charles Darwin describe colour in the field?

In our newest BJHS issue, Joyce Dixon examines Darwin’s use of Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours during the Beagle voyage—and what it meant for scientific communication.

Forget birdwatching, I’m into moth-watching: they’re fascinating and misunderstood insects | Helen Pilcher According to new research, distinguishing between the UK’s 2,500 species could halt cognitive decline – so my brain could not be happier, or healthier, says science writer Helen Pilcher

Even @theguardian.com knows that it's #YearOfTheMoth!

Forget birdwatching, I’m into moth-watching: they’re fascinating and misunderstood insects | Helen Pilcher | The Guardian www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Intense hot pink morph of an adult female Arota festae. Photographed at 23:32 on 27 March 2025 on Barro Colorado Island, Panama, using a Sony A7CR camera with a LAOWA 90 mm f/2.8 lens and a Godox Speedlite TT350 flash. The final image was produced by focus stacking 4 photographs in Adobe Photoshop, with brightness increased for clarity while leaving saturation and hue unaltered. Photo credit: Zeke W. Rowe.

👏🏻 title of the year?! 👏🏻

Pink cricket club: Dramatic color change in a Neotropical leaf-masquerading katydid

From @benitoexplains.bsky.social & @zekerowe.bsky.social

esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Introducing the campest katydid of all time. 🦄💅🏽👸💞 Why would this animal (Arota festae) have evolved this way, other than to look utterly fabulous? We have unleashed some (slightly whacky) thoughts, now out in @esajournals.bsky.social. Photo credit: @zekerowe.bsky.social doi.org/10.1002/ecy.... 1/n

thanks @ghodgson.bsky.social!! 😁

🤩We’re excited to announce our winner of Capturing Ecology🤩

🐊Zeke Rowe, @zekerowe.bsky.social, with their photo 'Wouldn't hurt a fly'🪰

Taken in Panama, the image shows an American crocodile fixing the camera with its golden eyes, utterly unmoved as blood-sucking horse flies feed on its snout.

Great work, Matías! Those figures are seriously beautiful 😍

Tetrapod vocal evolution reveals faster rates and higher-pitched sounds for mammals Abstract. Using the voice to produce sound is a widespread form of communication and plays an important role across diverse species and contexts. Variation

Now out in Evolution @journal-evo.bsky.social

Tetrapod vocal evolution reveals faster rates and higher-pitched sounds for mammals 🐘🦉🐸.

Mammalian hearing likely allowed the rapid diversification of their vocalizations.

Open access here:
doi.org/10.1093/evol...

#bioacoustics #animalcommunication

🕷️ Evaluation of BugBox, a software platform for AI-assisted bioinventories of arthropods

📖 Read the full paper here➡️ buff.ly/3GMV0Is

Project Psyche: reference genomes for all Lepidoptera in Europe Project Psyche is a transnational initiative to generate and study chromosome-level reference genomes of all ~11 000 species of Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths) found in Europe. Here, we describe t...

🦋 🧬 Feature review @cp-trendsecolevo.bsky.social: "Project Psyche @projectpsyche.bsky.social : reference genomes for all Lepidoptera in Europe", with @erebiologa.bsky.social and @entomoprofessor.bsky.social from @universidadoviedo.bsky.social

www.cell.com/trends/ecolo...

Functional and evolutionary synergy of trait components can explain the existence of leaf masquerade in katydids The evolution of complex adaptations often involves synergistic changes in multiple traits that lack standalone function. This study shows that leaf masquerade in katydids evolved through concurrent m...

Leaf? 🍃 Or katydid? 🦗
Our new
@plosbiology.org paper sheds light on how these incredible mimics evolved their disguises, and what this reveals about how complex adaptations arise. We find that coordinated evolution between traits might be the answer… plos.io/4oUE741 1/n

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

The value of public R&D

Government has published one of those quiet but important documents that might get overlooked as it is not 'newsy'. The headline finding is that £1 of public R&D investment generates £8 in net economic benefits for the UK over the long term
www.gov.uk/government/p...

Diy glowy light hooked up to battery

We now have full documentation up for if you just want to make your self a super duper inexpensive Moth Light!

Build your own #opensource Mothbeam!
digital-naturalism-laboratories.github.io/Mothbox/docs...

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...

Researchers Rosa Pollard Smith and Prof Ed Turner monitoring insects at one of the sets of banks at the Wildlife Trust BCN’s Pegsdon Hills reserve. Photo by Ben Andrews

Engineering for insects! 🐜🐞

New butterfly🦋banks at Trumpington offer an unprecedented chance to investigate climate change mitigation measures for invertebrates.

Read more: bit.ly/42V03n3

PS Related postgrad research project currently being advertised: bit.ly/47ikYSh

@wildlifebcn.org

They're gorgeous 😍

Noise pollution and artificial light at night alter selection pressures on sexual signals in an urban adapter Abstract. Human-induced environmental changes can have major impacts on how individuals communicate. Species using sexual signals may experience especially

How do light and noise pollution impact selection on sexual signals? We tested mate attraction and bat predation on túngara frogs. Light and noise interact in complex ways, and light pollution shifts selection on male calling:

doi.org/10.1093/jeb/...

@andrewdcronin.bsky.social et al.

Victoria’s riflebirds are masters of time, accelerating their dance tempo by reducing the durations between movements by just 50 milliseconds, before leveling off at 3 alternations per second and flashing their yellow mouth.

Read more about this spectacular dance here:
www.cell.com/current-biol...

Fully funded PhD working on insectivorous bird declines with a broad range of stakeholders. Starting ASAP #ornithology #zoology #biodiversity #science #ecology
www.exeter.ac.uk/study/fundin...

Vacancy — Postdoc Position in Decision Making in Birds Are you an expert in animal behavior? Do you have experience working with birds? The Institute of Biodiversity and Ecosystem Dynamics (IBED) is looking for a motivated researcher to investigate the ro...

I have a job opening in my lab. If you are interested in bird behaviour and predator prey interactions please take a look! werkenbij.uva.nl/en/vacancies...

Wood tiger moth on leaf. Photo: Juhani Maamela.

Funded PhD position available 🎉 Come and work with me in Helsinki to uncover the pathways producing colourful tiger moth wings. Lots of options for genomics, CRISPR, fieldwork, behaviour experiments… Email with questions! jobs.helsinki.fi/job/Helsinki...

From policy to practice: progress towards data- and code-sharing in ecology and evolution | Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences Data and code are essential for ensuring the credibility of scientific results and facilitating reproducibility, areas in which journal sharing policies play a crucial role. However, in ecology and ev...

New paper! 🥳📜 We reviewed 275 ecology & evolution journals: only 38% mandate data sharing & 27% mandate code sharing. 📉

We share recommendations to help close this gap. 💡

👉 Paper: royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...
👉 Blog: royalsociety.org/blog/2025/09...

Elon Musk has damaged science in the U.S., and here he is this weekend undermining democracy in the U.K.

Yet @royalsociety.org still has him as a Fellow.

If "a Fellowship of the world's most eminent scientists" doesn't stand up to fascism, something is very, very wrong.

Genome sequencing progress for Lepidoptera. Stacked bar charts represent the cumulative number of lepidopteran species with a reference genome per year. The colours represent the different levels of genome assembly quality, ranging from contig to chromosome-level. Numbers in brackets represent the range in numbers of species that have a given assembly level per year. Data derived from GoaT on 05.09.2025.

(1/6) 🦋 We are thrilled to announce the release of the 1,000th reference genome of Lepidoptera species found in Europe!
This goal was reached with the release of Stenoptilia islandicus, also known as the mountain plume moth.
Read the story below!👇🏽

Your red is my red, at least to our brains Despite philosophical debates, colors like red may spark similar brain activity across individuals, new research suggests.

“The results show that neural reactions to colors are somewhat standard and don’t seem to vary much from person to person. But these neuroanatomical findings can’t answer the question of how it feels to see red…”

#scicomm
#neuroskyence

www.sciencenews.org/article/red-...
🧪 🧠

Just wrapped up one of the biggest chapters of my life—successfully defended my PhD! 🎓✨
Years of fieldwork, writing, and countless late nights have finally come together. Feeling grateful, relieved, and excited for what’s next. 🌿🪶 #PhDDefense #NewBeginnings #BehaviouralEcology

Do birds tune their songs to their hearing?

Is there tight coevolution between avian vocal signals and hearing-or do signallers and perceivers evolve more loosely?

It turns out perfect tuning is not required...

Preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

#bioacoustics
#prattle 💬
#ornithology 🪶

How do light and noise pollution impact selection on sexual signals?

We tested mate attraction and bat predation on túngara frogs in the field.

Full text: doi.org/10.1093/jeb/...

#evolutionarybiology
#animalbehavior
@eseb.bsky.social
@jevbio.bsky.social

Photo: Grant Maslowski