Amazing position with a great PI on a fantastic topic! 🐦 Go!

📢One week left to apply! To promote research on #animal #behaviour in Greece, we are organizing a 3 day workshop on methods, from social evolution to collective behaviour 🐭🐟🐦🐒✨

📍 Crete☀️
🗓️ July 13-15
🌐 marinapapa.github.io/TRASEworksho...
Supported by @biologists.bsky.social 🙏

DM for questions!

Programme - ECBB 2026 - ARU Find out about the programme for the European Conference for Behavioural Biology (ECBB) 2026, taking place at ARU in Cambridge from 1-4 September.

Join us for the European Conference for Behavioural Biology (ECBB) 1-4 September 2026, Cambridge, UK!
I'm thrilled to be giving a keynote talk on social cognition in a human world. Submissions for oral/poster presentations close 30 April. www.aru.ac.uk/events/confe...

Increasing temperature reduces decision accuracy by shifting speed–accuracy trade-offs in slower individuals Abstract. Cognitive responses are linked to consistent individual behavioural variation, but the potential impact of warming on this relationship remains u

Excited to share our new paper @royalsocietypublishing.org This one took what felt like endless maze trials.

We found that even modest warming (~1°C) changed an ectotherm's behaviour such that it affected cognitive performance. Speeding them up and reducing decision accuracy.

For decades biologists assumed ravens follow wolves to their kills.
Our paper @science.org shows something different: ravens rarely follow wolves far. Instead they remember areas where wolf kills are common and return to them—sometimes from >150 km away.
doi.org/10.1126/science.adz9467
📷Dan Stahler

Close up of a herring gull, with red around the yellow eye, and a red spot on the lower beak

🚨Not one, but two papers now out on response inhibition (also called motoric self-regulation or inhibitory control in the field of animal cognition). Many studies find no link between individual performance on different tasks supposedly measuring response inhibition.
1/6

Among-trait covariance and cross-year repeatability for direct and indirect individual effects in producer–scrounger behaviour in wild house sparrows Abstract. Variation in traits expressed during social interactions can be attributed to direct individual effects (DIEs) of the focal individual’s identity

Happy to share that our work on direct & indirect social effects in producer-scrounger behaviours was recently published in JEB:
academic.oup.com/jeb/advance-...

@roriwijnhorst.bsky.social @dingemanselab.bsky.social @ali--wilson.bsky.social

Recent breeding experience improves egg ejection behaviour Abstract. Recognizing one’s own eggs is crucial for birds, especially for hosts of brood parasites that must identify and reject different-looking parasiti

Hot off the press 🐣 Do birds have any idea of what their eggs look like? Contrary to our expectations, we show that barn swallows don't, nor do they learn it over time. Yet that doesn't stop them from successfully ejecting foreign eggs!
🔗 Read more here: doi.org/10.1098/rsbl... #OpenAccess

Have you ever wondered how animals were using affective states to cope with our activities?

Here's our NEW PAPER (and my first) that tells you everything you need to know and how much should we feel concerned by the consequences of our activities besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

There is still some time to submit for our Special Collection on social cognition and anthropogenic environments! We are looking forward to hear from you! link.springer.com/collections/... Please do get in touch if you have any questions.
#openaccess #socialcognition

New paper out!

Early-life social instability increases aggression in chickens, but does not affect response inhibition 🐤
We discuss what this means for developmental links between social environments, cognition, and social behaviour, highlighting strong context dependence

Full text: rdcu.be/eYOzC

✨New paper✨
How do juvenile ravens find social groups?

We describe how juvenile common ravens, who have left their natal territories seeking to join non-breeder flocks, use space with respect to other birds, and discuss what this means for social integration.

www.cell.com/iscience/ful...

The impact of urbanisation on social behaviour: a comprehensive review Urbanisation is a key driver of global environmental change and presents animals with novel stressors and challenges. It can fundamentally influence social behaviour and has the potential to reshape ...

🎉 Very excited to share that our review on the impact of urbanization on animal social behaviour is out now in Biological Reviews!

We synthesize evidence across taxa to understand how city life reshapes social systems 🏙️🐦🐒🦎🦝🐟

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

@lizabeldm.bsky.social

📢 Our new article entitled “With or without you: common marmoset, Callithrix jacchus, personality expression is mediated by social setting” has just come out *open access* in #AnimalBehaviourJournal! ✨ 🥰🥳🐒 @asab.org

doi.org/10.1016/j.an...

A thread. 😊

1/3 Cooperative hunting in ravens

Brown-necked ravens (C. ruficollis) work together to prevent lizards (U. aegyptia) from entering and blocking their burrow by inflating their bodies using their pointed tails to obstruct the entrance.

(paper; 2010) link.springer.com/article/10.1...

That's amazing!!! Congratulations 🎉

"Unsung Songbirds: Advances in the Study of Corvid Communication" - a new review paper (preprint) https://ecoevorxiv.org/repository/view/10600/ Corvids are amazing, so I'm v pleased to be a small part of this review led by Claudia Wascher and Valerie Dufour. #corvids #bioacoustics

An integrative, peer‐reviewed and open‐source cooperative‐breeding database (Co‐BreeD) Co-BreeD is the first updatable and open-source database dedicated to cooperative breeding. It enables continuous, non-binary measurement of cooperative breeding, transforming how we study breeding s...

Delighted to be part of this very collaborative venture: The Cooperative-Breeding Database (Co-BreeD), now live: doi.org/10.1111/1365...
Contains data from 450+ populations of 320+ species (and is expandable).
Thanks @benmocha.bsky.social @maikewoith.bsky.social for leading.
@co-breed.bsky.social

Excited to announce that Eli Garcia-Pelegrin and I are co-editing a special collection for Animal Cognition on "Social Cognition in a Human World". Do you study how urbanization, pollution, heat stress, fragmentation, ... affects cognition? We want to hear from you! link.springer.com/collections/...

Mic’d bats reveal midnight songbird attacks Sensor data reveal greater noctule bats chasing, catching and chewing on birds during high-altitude, nighttime hunts.

🧪 Incredible research reveals how greater noctule bats seek out, capture, and eat songbirds--all on the wing. (Also, my first story for @sciencenews.bsky.social!) 🦇🪶☠️ www.sciencenews.org/article/bats...

Adorable 🤩

Visit our website and learn more about the @behavecol.bsky.social conference venue, host city and schedule!

www.isbe2026.com

Wild jackdaws learn to tolerate juveniles to exploit new foraging opportunities | Biology Letters Social tolerance can enhance access to resources and is thought to be crucial in facilitating the evolution of cooperation, social cognition and culture, but it is unknown whether animals can optimize...

New @cornishjackdaws.bsky.social paper out today in @royalsociety.org Biology Letters. We found adult jackdaws can learn to tolerate usually bullied or ignored juveniles when they provided information about a new foraging resource.

royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

A great tailed grackle, a black slender bird with a long tail, is eating fast food cheese sauce in a parking lot. Photo credit C. Logan

„behavioral flexibility, while helpful in allowing birds to adapt to new environments, is not the primary facilitator for range expansion“

news.ucsb.edu/2025/021980/both-flexibi...

#TheGrackleProject

Congratulations for your PhD ☺️🎉

A young quail in front of a transparent barrier, looking towards a massive bowl of grains and mealworms

This study was a team effort so thank you to: @katywillcox.bsky.social Reinoud Allaert @anneleendewulf.bsky.social Wen Zhang @camilletroisi.bsky.social Sophia Knoch, An Martel, Luc Lens, @fredverb.bsky.social @ecobird.bsky.social

1) Quails raised in small groups had worse inhibition, but no group difference in aggression. 2) Quails more aggressive towards unfamiliar individuals pecked more at the transparent cylinder. Aggression and inhibition are partly linked, but other factors mediate the influence of social group size.

We raised 120 Japanese quails in small groups of 5 or large groups of 15 and evaluated 1) the effect of social group size on response inhibition (inhibitory control, RI) and aggression at a group-level, and 2) whether deficits in inhibition were linked to increased aggression at an individual-level.

To peck or not to peck: the influence of early-life social environment on response inhibition and impulsive aggression in Japanese quails | Royal Society Open Science Deficits in response inhibition (RI; i.e. the ability to suppress inappropriate responses) may contribute to increased impulsive aggression (IA; i.e. unplanned behaviours that harm others). Since earl...

New paper out!
To Peck or Not To Peck: The influence of early-life social environment on response inhibition and impulsive aggression in Japanese quails royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

A beautiful, slender, blue corvid picking up a pine cone to extract the seeds

Big thank you to Nanxi Huang for her help with data collection, Abdelrahman Elzayadi for his help with video scoring, and to Debbie Kelly for her guidance and advice!

Picture by the Bandelier National Monument

#corvids #birdcognition #caching