A disabled kea parrot is the alpha male of his circus Bruce, a kea parrot missing his entire upper beak, achieved alpha male status with the aid of an innovative lower-beak jousting technique. Grabham et al. demonstrate that behavioural innovation can he...

Fascinating study!

Also, I learnt today that a group of kea is called a circus!

The First Cleaner Ant? A Novel Partnership in the Arizona Desert I give an account of an undescribed ant species from Arizona that licks and nips the much larger workers of a different ant species in manner remarkably parallel to the actions of cleaner fish that c...

Cleaner ants in the desert!

I think this paper beautifully illustrates how much we don't know about ants and their relationships with other species!

I took this modeling course in 2022 and really enjoyed it! The course provided me with a great framework to understand modeling papers. So if you are interested in modeling in biology in any capacity, check out the pre-print below!

Seminar Series 2026: 1. Dr. Anna Dornhaus YouTube video by Animal Behaviour Live

📣SEMINAR SERIES 2026📣
Our 1st seminar of this year !

📆Tuesday 28th April 2026 at 2pm GMT on Youtube: Dr. Anna Dornhaus (@dornhaus.bsky.social) on “What we learned about the world from studying collective behavior: algorithms, replicators, and strong inference” 🐜

🔗 www.youtube.com/watch?v=oioL...

Check out my latest paper!

I have written a 🧵on this paper: bsky.app/profile/chjo...

Thank you very much Erica!

Future experiments examining how individual abandonment affects colony-level foraging will allow us to disentangle these explanations. Moreover, application of this framework in a comparative context can allow us to understand how and when robustness is prioritized in collective systems (6/6).

This implies a lack of robustness against pheromone trail disruption. However, colony-level foraging may be modular due to several concurrent pheromone trails. This would allow workers to switch to an intact trail, thereby buffering them against such a perturbation (5/6).

Most ants continued to make random choices, showing a high reliance on pheromone trail for navigation. Fire ants can easily monopolize a food source with a huge and aggressive workforce, thereby reducing colonies’ investment per forager in being successful at food recovery (4/6).

We found that most ants abandoned the food source in response to trail perturbation! However, ants were more persistent and less likely to abandon a high-quality food source. But this persistence did not translate to successful foraging. Why? (3/6)

We removed a small section of the pheromone trail leading to a low or a high-quality food source on a T-maze setup and examined individual ant responses. We utilized the robustness mechanism framework from systems biology to interpret ant responses to this perturbation (2/6).

Persist or give up? Fire ants motivated to search for a high-quality food source even if they don’t know how to find it - Insectes Sociaux Insectes Sociaux - Finding resources for the colony is one of the most difficult and risky tasks for a social insect worker. A worker on a foraging trip can face a number of challenges, including...

Paper alert 🚨🐜! Fire ant foraging looks remarkably robust until you perturb their communication. @dornhaus.bsky.social and I tested how fire ants respond to disruptions in pheromone trail communication during foraging. More in the thread below 🧵(1/6).
link.springer.com/article/10.1...

The majority of ants continued to make random choices, showing a high reliance on pheromone trail for navigation. Fire ants can easily monopolize a food source with a huge and aggressive workforce. This may reduce colonies’ investment per forager in being successful at food recovery (4/6).

We found that most ants abandoned the food source in response to trail perturbation! However, ants were more persistent and less likely to abandon a high-quality food source. But this persistence did not translate to successful foraging. Why? (3/6).

We removed a small section of the pheromone trail leading to a low or a high-quality food source on a T-maze setup and examined individual ant responses. We utilized the robustness mechanism framework from systems biology to interpret ant responses to this perturbation (2/6).

The majority of ants continued to make random choices, showing a high reliance on pheromone trail for navigation. Fire ants can easily monopolize over a food source with their huge and aggressive workforce. This may reduce colonies’ investment per forager in being successful at food recovery (4/6).

We found that most ants abandoned the food source in response to trail perturbation! However, ants were more persistent and less likely to abandon a high-quality food source. But this persistence did not translate to successful foraging. Why? (3/6)

We removed a small section of the pheromone trail leading to a low or a high-quality food source on a T-maze setup and examined individual ant responses. We utilized the robustness mechanism framework from systems biology to interpret ant responses to this perturbation. (2/6)

Two Masters thesis position openings up on the lab website: activesensingcollectives.com/openings

Especially interesting perhaps if you're into acoustics, graphical design, realtime visualisations, and algorithms.

Please do spread the word and forward in your circles.

Open postdoc position in my lab at Cornell, conducting comparative and experimental studies on transcriptomic responses to diet and toxins, utilizing the milkweed-insect community. Background in molecular bio & herbivory desired. academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/31867

Great article! Sorry to hear that your celebratory posts attracted so much hatred for no reason. Kudos to you for leveraging vitriol into an opportunity! I have your thesis and papers on my reading list!

I really liked this line: 'Visibility is not vanity; it’s part of building a career.' So true!

It’s me!

Bumble bees that follow a stricter routine innovate less: Foraging behaviors, environmental complexity, and how they relate to novel problem solving www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03...

📣 Call for Applications: The University of Vienna invites applications for more than 40 fully funded doctoral positions across a broad range of disciplines in Life Sciences and Natural Sciences. 👨‍🔬👩‍🔬 #PhDSky #PhD #univie
📅 Application period: 2 March – 27 March 2026, 12:00 CET

More information: ⤵️

🐜 European Ant Identification Workshop 2026 🐜

📍 Banyuls-sur-Mer, France
📅 June 3–7, 2026

A hands-on workshop focused on European ant diversity, collection methods, and identification — set in the amazing Mediterranean–Pyrenean place of Banyuls-sur-Mer 🌿🏞️

The Burmeister Lab: Studying Microbial Evolution and Extinction ​Our research integrates evolutionary biology and microbiology, using bacteria and phage as study systems to address fundamental questions in both fields. ​ ​We study microbial evolution, a...

Alita Burmeister (@aburmeister.bsky.social) is looking to hire a postdoc (or potentially a PhD student) for projects on phage resistance and evolution. The position description is posted to the Eco-Evo Jobs wiki and also available on her lab's website (arburmeister.weebly.com).

This looks very exciting! Hoping we can discover many many more cool insects than we ever dreamt of.

I'm hiring a technician! www.cam.ac.uk/jobs/researc...

An 80% role in a 4-yr BBSRC project and hopefully beyond. Looking for someone to support the @socialfluids.bsky.social 🧪our ants 🐜 and our projects.

Looking for someone kind + conscientious + reliable who takes pride in a job well done.

Fascinating findings!

This is what I love about behavioral ecology experiments. Simple and clever experimental designs can elegantly answer important questions.

GitHub - chjoshi24/t-maze-laser-cricut-designs: This repository contains designs for T-mazes with different stem and arm lengths. You can use it to create T-mazes using different materials for your wo... This repository contains designs for T-mazes with different stem and arm lengths. You can use it to create T-mazes using different materials for your work. - chjoshi24/t-maze-laser-cricut-designs

Looking to build T-mazes for behavioral experiments? I’ve shared open, fully editable designs on my GitHub repository linked below. I used these designs for my own experiments.
Happy to chat if further if you have any questions !