We have an open MSc Project Position at the Urban Vervet Project, and are currently looking for a
motivated teammate to discover species interactions in a human altered environment 👇🏼 For more INFO👇🏼

New paper out in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: we apply linguistic tools to sperm whale vowels.

The result: sperm whale vowels do not just look like human vowels. They also behave like them.

We found several parallels. Like in Latin, whales have short and long vowels.

Rule-based sequences in sooty mangabey vocal communication Abstract. Investigating how non-human animals produce call sequences provides key insights into the evolutionary origins of meaning in vocal communication,

First chapter on rule-based sequences: royalsocietypublishing.org/rsos/article...

With @taichimpproject.bsky.social @tozbu.bsky.social @cogcompneuch.bsky.social @nccrlanguage.bsky.social

🐒 Second PhD chapter on sooty mangabeys out! The rule-based vocal sequences we first described? They might actually mean something! Females use specific combinations when handling others' infants, suggesting compositionality to signal benign intent 💞.

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Hiring for 3 positions: Research Assistant, Field Research Coordinator, and Postdoc I am looking to hire 3 people into my lab this year. I am still doing the paperwork to get the jobs officially posted but I want to send the word out and screen potential applications right away. R…

I am hiring a research assistant (vampire bats), a Panama fieldwork coordinator (vampire bats), and also considering postdoc apps (social behavior, any species): socialbat.org/2026/02/19/h...

Zebra finches in Australia; one of the study organisms for the PhD

Dwarf mongoose staring at a camera in South Africa; one of the PhD study organisms

📢Fully-funded #PhD opportunity with us

❓Quantifying animal #movement patterns & behavioural #interactions in a changing world

👥Joint position in @bristolbiosci.bsky.social & #MacquarieUniversity

📆19th April deadline
tinyurl.com/343acaev
#maths #modelling #data #fieldwork #Australia

🙏PLEASE SHARE

Measuring hierarchical structure across hominid percussive tool-use sequences Communications Biology - A new method for measuring hierarchical structure in sequential behavior shows chimpanzee tool-use is hierarchically structured and provides new comparative insights into...

NEW paper alert 📣
The idea, that tool use entails more complexity than serial behavioral sequences, is out there a while. However, proving such hierarchical organization and comparing it across tasks or even species was impossible. We present a possibility to finally investigate it:
rdcu.be/faxGa

Seeking a motivated postdoc (2+3 yrs) to study links between cognition, behavior, and fitness in lemurs at our long-term field site in Kirindy Forest, Madagascar. Join an interdisciplinary team working on wild populations. @primatenzentrum.bsky.social. Apply here: www.dpz.eu

🚨Job alert!🚨 The Cluster of Excellence HUMAN ORIGINS announces 2 junior Professor (W1) positions:
A W1 Tenure track Professorship in Evolutionary Modelling (shorturl.at/FN102) and a W1 Professorship (non Tenure-track) in Primatology (shorturl.at/sH0Mk)
Deadline: April 6 2026! Please share! 🔄

I’m advertising two position options (PhD/postdoc) within my lab - take a look below if you’re interested or send me a message ☺️ @uni-konstanz.de

3-year Independent Post-doc in Animal Behavior based at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama!

Three positions, each including salary & a research budget.

Applications due April, 15th.

DM if you are interesting in developing a project with us!

stri.si.edu/academic-pro...

🔬 We’re looking for a master's student for a thesis on "Nocturnal Vocalisations of Wild Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii)", starting around August 2026 in Neuchâtel.

More information: evolvinglanguage.ch/wp-content/u...

Supervision and contact: @noemiefreymond.bsky.social

Ontogenetic evidence of socially learned call sequences in Western Australian magpies Abstract. Combinatoriality is the capacity to combine discrete vocal elements into larger structures. Previously thought unique to human language, combinat

Young magpies learn to combine calls into "sentences" much like human toddlers: through listening to family and friends!

Now available to read at @royalsocietypublishing.org
@mandyridley.bsky.social @stephanielking.bsky.social @ceb-uwa.bsky.social

royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article...

Scientists studying wild sooty mangabeys in Ivory Coast have discovered that these West African #monkeys use sophisticated rules when combining their calls into sequences. Read the full #RSOS paper: royalsocietypublishing.org/rsos/article... @aurianelf.bsky.social @tozbu.bsky.social

Fully funded PhD position on primate parochialism! Study how cooperation within groups and conflict between groups evolve in red-fronted lemurs at our long-term field site in Kirindy Forest, Madagascar. @kirindy.bsky.social & @primatenzentrum.bsky.social. Apply here: www.dpz.eu

A screenshot of an RStudio window. On the left-hand side is a new pain called Posit Assistant. The Posit Assistant had recently run code making a lat-lon plot of Washington state, colored by whether the point had been marked as forested or not.

Today we're releasing AI for RStudio. It's really, really good—I'd encourage you to point it at the messiest data sources you have and see what it can do.

www.simonpcouch.com/blog/2026-03...

An ancient dog breed regulates pitch when howling with music Patel et al. show a component of human singing, the ability to coordinate vocal pitch with other simultaneous voices, exists in the howling of an ancient dog breed. This shows the ability can arise in...

“flexible control of voice pitch can evolve independently of complex vocal learning in the context of simultaneous group vocalization” (“simultaneous pitch regulation as a precursor of complex vocal learning, not its byproduct”?)
cool @currentbiology.bsky.social study led by A. Patel 🧪🎶

🐒 My first PhD chapter is out! We describe the vocal sequence repertoire of wild sooty mangabeys and show that they use combinatorial rules. Follow-up paper coming soon 👀

@taichimpproject.bsky.social @cogcompneuch.bsky.social @tozbu.bsky.social

🔗 royalsocietypublishing.org/rsos/article...

The As and Bs of titi monkey linguistics: why emotional communication is not the enemy The alarm call sequences of titi monkeys (genera Plecturocebus, Callicebus and Cheracebus) have sparked important debates over whether they exhibit parallels with human language. Some researchers con...

🚨New animal linguistics paper🚨

Together with @geoffreymesbahi.bsky.social and @maelmleroux.bsky.social, we tried to finally answer this question: Do titi monkeys have complex syntactic skills?

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

New paper out👂📢🐒! We highlight the remarkable expertise of local field assistants at BCFS (Uganda) in interpreting chimpanzee pant-hoot calls—identifying who is calling, their age, sex, and context—revealing scientific knowledge built through years of experience. doi.org/10.1098/rspb...

Examining combinatoriality within the pūkeko vocal repertoire Most animals use various vocalizations to communicate with others and coordinate activities. However, animals are limited in the number of sounds they…

My latest article is finally published:
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

we examine how Australasian swamphen (Pukeko) combine different sounds into all the different calls. We also examine call sequences and find that calls become longer along some calling sequences

Our group at the University of Magdeburg 🇩🇪 is looking for a motivated PhD candidate to study cognitive fleixbility and uncertainty in mice within the DZPG/C-I-R-C (c-i-r-c.de). 🧠🐭
For more information, please see: www.med.ovgu.de/Karriere/Ste...

#PhDPosition #BehavioralNeuroscience

Looking for a Postdoc position and have a background in bioacoustics and animal cognition? Interested in whether other animals might have something akin to language? Join our team: www.oeaw.ac.at/en/oeaw-home...

📢 Calling all primatologists 📢

EFP2026 in Montpellier is now open for abstracts & registration!

🗓 Deadline for abstract : 13 March 2026 (before if mobility grant application)

Submit: www.alphavisa.com/efp/2026/abs...

Register: www.alphavisa.com/efp/2026/reg...

All abstracts will be accepted!

Job alert! Fully funded PhD position on the link between curiosity and cognition in lemurs at our long-term field site Kirindy Forest in Madagascar @kirindy.bsky.social & @primatenzentrum.bsky.social. This project is part of @rtg2906-curiosity.bsky.social.
Apply here: www.dpz.eu

Super proud of this fabulous team for challenging old comparative frameworks and rethinking what makes language language.
Read more in the thread below 👇 or here 📖😊: www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

Come and join our lab! We have TWO fully funded PhD positions AND a paid field assistant opportunity in our Behavioral Ecology group @uni-goettingen.de & @primatenzentrum.bsky.social. Projects will be part of @rtg2906-curiosity.bsky.social & @sfb1528.bsky.social!!
Details in thread. Please re-post!