The Azrieli Visiting PhD Fellowship enables outstanding international PhD candidates to conduct short-term research in Israel, fostering collaboration with leading researchers. azrielifoundation.org/fellows/visi...
Posts by Amiyaal Ilany
Many wild populations are fragmenting and declining, leading to inbreeding.
We are studying how animals avoid inbreeding and the consequences of inbreeding an in a >20 year study of >20,000 wild mice with whole genomes.
We are recruiting a postdoc at Columbia and two PhD students in U Zurich.
New research from #BiologyLetters: How do infections impact social relationships? royalsocietypublishing.org/rsbl/article... | #Behaviour #Ecology #Evolution #Epidemiology
I got to the humiliating stage where the agent is AIsplaining me why the pipeline I asked for doesn't fit my goal, and proving it using the paper I shared with it...
A bachelor male rock hyrax enjoying spring time
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...
Registrations are now open for the renowned PhD Summer school in acoustic communication organised by SDU from 2-15.8 Denmark. Deadline 15.4. More info in picture below. 🦜🐳🦗🦇
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
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
This is an awesome discovery:
A single-celled organism with no brain called Stentor seems capable of Pavlovian learning. Yes, it can actually learn to associate two things despite having no neurons.
My latest for @newscientist.com. 🧪 #science #memory #learning
www.newscientist.com/article/2519...
🧠🧪🧵1/37
Our new paper on how pinniped (seal and sea lion) brains evolved to unlock vocal plasticity is this week's @science.org cover.
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Workshop on Animal Social Evolution! July 13th-15th, Heraklion (Greece)
We are inviting early-career researchers from Greece and the Eastern Mediterranean to a hands-on, three-day workshop dedicated to methods and tools in social behaviour and evolution
marinapapa.github.io/TRASEworksho...
Leipzig U and the MPI for Evolutionary Anthropology (MPI-EVA) have an open faculty position (W2) in evolutionary population genetics! This position is tenured and comes with generous core funding. We are eager to welcome a new colleague! Deadline March 11.
www.uni-leipzig.de/en/newsdetai...
"Two charismatic marsupial species that had been thought extinct for 6,000 years are alive in rainforest in remote West Papua."
Oh yeah this is super cool as both the pygmy long-fingered possum and ring-tailed glider were previously only known from fossils 🤯🧪🐀
www.theguardian.com/environment/...
Anyone who is an expert in #gutmicrobiome research is interested in collaborating with us to study #free-rangingdogs in India? Please get in touch!
How and why does cognition vary so greatly between individuals and species? In @natrevbiodiv.nature.com, we propose the "Predatory Intelligence Hypothesis" which posits that the cognitive challenges associated with predator–prey interactions drive a cognitive co-evolutionary arms race
rdcu.be/e5KIj
🚨JOB alert🚨
We have three (yes, THREE) 🌟lectureships🌟 advertised in the School of Biological Sciences, University of Bristol.
Broad remit, including #AnimalBehaviour & #GlobalChangeBiology
⏱️Deadline: 8th March 2026
🙏Please circulate widely
😊Come join us!
Full #job details: tinyurl.com/y3us95rc
Two house mice interacting in an enclosure
🎉 What a way to end the year!
Very excited to see our new paper on 🐭 innovation and mate choice out in @currentbiology.bsky.social!
doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2025.11.077
With the amazing @fragdarm.bsky.social, @valmazza.bsky.social & Anja Guenther
I learned a lot from this paper, showing that for most microbes, humans host only one strain in their gut. This implies that we can track strains and their transmission between hosts. I'm wondering if it varies among host species.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
🎉🍾 very excited to see this out before 2025 ends doi.org/10.1111/2041... with Will Hoppitt in @methodsinecoevol.bsky.social. This paper is an overview of our new R package STbayes, a user-friendly toolkit for performing Bayesian NBDA analyses. @cbehav.bsky.social @mpi-animalbehav.bsky.social
Our newest research in @currentbiology.bsky.social:
www.cell.com/current-biol...
We find dominant baboons have more interrupted and less rest at night.
Author list and story in comments below :-)
Interested in how life history may shape the gut microbiome of a wild mammal? Keen on getting to work with an iconic long-term study system in Scotland?
Check out this PhD opportunity with me, Josephine Pemberton and @gfalbery.bsky.social
Reach out to chat more!
www.findaphd.com/phds/project...
Jumping spiders can recognise one another. This ability to learn, remember and represent images is quite surprising for such a tiny-brained animal!
buff.ly/dCkwPr0
I wrote a little bit about the "missing heritability" question and several recent studies that have brought it to a close. A short 🧵
Jolie, an adult female chimpanzee of the Ngogo community in Kibale National Park, Uganda, with sleeping infant son, Zawinul. CREDIT: Kevin Langergraber
After the Ngogo chimpanzee group killed 21 members of neighboring groups and expanded their territory by 22%, female birth rates more than doubled and infant survival increased sharply—showing clear fitness benefits from intergroup killing. In PNAS: https://ow.ly/TKmf50XuPjY
Meerkat pups in the Kalahari, South Africa
Rhesus macaques in Cayo Santiago
Dwarf mongoose staring at a camera, South Africa.
📢Two fully-funded #PhD opportunities to work with us:
Topic: Social monitoring & manipulation
UK-domiciled black-heritage scheme: tinyurl.com/aja54nr6
NERC DLTP: tinyurl.com/4jfy47pp
Cosupervisors: #PatrickKennedy @ljnbrent.bsky.social
@bristolbiosci.bsky.social
#bioacoustics #mammals #fieldwork
Each dyad (a, b) moves through four discrete states over time, represented by coloured circles. The dyad remains in a given state for a certain duration, or "holding time", before transitioning to a new state according to state-specific transition probabilities, indicated by arrows showing all possible (non-zero) transitions. Paintings by Sofia M. Pereira & Judith von Nordheim.
New paper!
We propose a framework to empirically study animal social relationships by modelling social network (SN) data as time-series—that is, without the need to aggregate them over time.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
🚨STOP SCROLLING, IT’S AN EMERGENCY BROADCAST📣 This message will self-destruct in 10…9…8…7…⏰ …now that I have your attention:
🧪Our new paper on Alerting Components in animal vocalization is out in AnimBehav🎉
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
#AnimalBehaviour #Bioacoustics #Communication
‼️ Thrilled to share my first article on the Kalahari meerkats ‼️, in @animalecology.bsky.social! Group membership strongly influences gut microbiomes & especially the co-occurrence of beneficial bacteria, beyond animals' age or sex, disease status, or environmental exposure
doi.org/10.1111/1365...