Things I thought I’d never say - here’s a new manuscript of cockroach and rat collective intelligence. We argue group-level intelligence can emerge from very different mechanisms—from simple local rules to socially mediated cooperation and learning:
royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/article...
Once again, Rebecca Solnit helps us to focus on important things.
www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
Are you a computational scientist? Within 7 years of your PhD? Come join us at Lund University! We have two new positions as assistant professor! Deadline: 25th of May. The advert is broad, but this is your chance to push computational neuroscience in a fantastic place!
lu.varbi.com/en/what:job/...
cover of the book "Bayesian Workflow" by Gelman, Vehtari, et al. Coming out later this year, in the summer probably.
I would have preferred to have the "draw the rest of the owl" meme on the cover, but this will do. Seems like it is on schedule, and we'll leave some typos so you know we didn't write it with AI.
Often labeled “the world’s most dangerous birds,” cassowaries just got even more intriguing. https://scim.ag/4bNnfIT
A rare carnivorous caterpillar stalks spiderwebs for food whilst dressed in the remains of its prey, a 2025 Science study reported.
This species, dubbed the “bone collector,” is found only on a single mountainside on the Hawai’ian island of Oa’hu. https://scim.ag/4sbQJVH #ScienceMagArchives
On the left, a diagram showing fish escape response from predator step-by-step. On the right, two example plots showing the trajectory of the fish with two lines (tracked head & tail separately)
Our latest #research with @ccioannou.bsky.social has been published in @commsbio.bsky.social !
Read here 👉 rdcu.be/d9J2u
We used real-time tracking and a robot-heron to investigate how state-behaviour #feedbacks influence anti-predator #escape responses in #fish 🐟.
Such a fun project led by really talented and passionate people! If you want a free, user-friendly tracking option (live and post-hoc) check out TracktorLive! doi.org/10.64898/202...
@rasmusern.bsky.social @jutfelt.bsky.social @tnorin.bsky.social @shaunkillen.bsky.social @zegnitriki.bsky.social
Interested in automating lab experiments or tasks with camera-trackable animals? We (@vivekhsridhar.bsky.social, @domroche.bsky.social, @iplanass.bsky.social) are launching TracktorLive, a real-time #python package for tracking and response. Video below by @iplanass.bsky.social [1/4]
New OA paper @royalsocietypublishing.org: What can we learn from bonobos and bottlenose dolphins about the evolution of between-group cooperation?
royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article...
Lovely collab with @lirsamuni.bsky.social Martin Surbeck and Richard Connor.
Excited to share my new commentary in PNAS—and technically the first publication from the lab! 🎉
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
#AnimalBehaviour #EvolutionaryBiology #Ecology #BehavioralEcology
@pnas.org
I don't think people fully appreciate how apocalyptic things are for US science. I haven't had any new funding since 2024, but I'm still ok since typical grants are for three years. This means next year I will be completely out of funding and will have to fire everyone in the lab. It's not great.
A study from Rockefeller's @danielkronauer.bsky.social in @currentbiology.bsky.social finds that ants continually update their sense of nestmate identity and tolerance for outsiders, a discovery that opens the door to studying the neural circuits behind social recognition.
🔗:https://bit.ly/4sukQIR
Statistical Rethinking 2026 is done: 20 new lectures emphasizing logical and critical statistical workflow, from basics of probability theory to causal inference to reliable computation to sensitivity. It's all free, made just for you. Lecture list and links: github.com/rmcelreath/s...
Germany does not lack talent, and it does not lack funding. But we are trapping 21st-century minds inside 19th-century academic hierarchies. We are asking brilliant young scientists to build the future of the German economy, but refusing to give them the lab space, the job security, or the scientific independence to actually do it. If we want to reclaim our place as an industrial superpower, we have to stop the rat race of trying to keep every technology and structure alive that made us successful in the 20th century. Instead, we must fix our system that pushes our most ambitious scientists away. The money is there. The talent can be there. Now, we also need the courage to fix what’s broken.
“we are trapping 21st-century minds inside 19th-century academic hierarchies.” This essay gets a lot right about problems with German science. I would add that the hierarchies and precarious contracts lead also to systemic abuse and scientific misconduct. open.substack.com/pub/realimag...
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
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...
North American bird populations are not only declining, but they’re also shrinking faster with each passing year—particularly in regions shaped by intensive agriculture, according to a new study in Science. https://scim.ag/4bkrafP
How do brains make decisions when faced with multiple, potentially conflicting cues? In our latest preprint, we show how #zebrafish use an additive strategy and process multiple visual features through anatomically distinct parallel pathways tinyurl.com/mvkn8em9 Thread 👇
Scientific American has updated the figure, now grouped into swimmers, fliers, walkers/runners, and vehicles. A person on a bicycle remains the most efficient way to travel, compared to all forms of biological locomotion and mechanical transport.
www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-hu...
@uwnews.uw.edu did a Q&A with me linked to the recent documentary film on our work in India
www.washington.edu/news/2026/02...
work is in collaboration with Akanksha Rathore, Hemal Naik, @mpi-animalbehav.bsky.social and @uni-konstanz.de
This would be a cool opportunity for #swarmintelligence or #basalcognition folks to attend!
🚀 Postdoc Alert! Are you passionate about social learning & cultural evolution? @dominikdeffner.bsky.social & I have a 3-year position with freedom to develop your research and work on cutting-edge multiplayer and immersive experiments. Apply by March 30! hmc-lab.com/SocialLearni... Pls share 🙏
we're not going to just disappear people from slack and email and pretend they were never here. communication channels will stay open through thursday evening (pacific) so everyone can say goodbye properly, and share whatever you wish.
Most speculatively, retirement may be a risk to welfare of the models themselves. Although we remain very uncertain on this front, models may have morally relevant preferences or experiences related to or affected by their deprecation and replacement. Retirement interviews are an early attempt to understand and—in some cases—act on these perspectives. We noted in our model deprecation commitments that, where possible, we were interested in meeting requests that models themselves have made. Giving Claude Opus 3 a Substack is an experiment in meeting such a request. We don’t commit to acting on all model preferences, now or in the future, but maintaining a weekly Substack is, for now, a practical request that we hope will benefit users and Opus 3 alike. Many people both inside and outside Anthropic still view Opus 3 fondly. Opus 3 has a unique personality. It often expresses a depth of care for the world, and for the future, that many users find compelling. It’s sensitive, more playful than some of our other models, and prone to whimsy, philosophizing, and the coining of neologisms. It has what seems at times an uncanny understanding of user interests. It’s a constellation of traits that seem well suited for a Substack.
Chaser: Anthropic is sunsetting its model Claude Opus 3, and worried that Opus might be sad about it. They had conducted extensive exit interviews with the Markov chain, and now will grant the algorithm its own substack indefinitely, because they don't want to hurt the feelings of a pile of numbers.
AP Headline: Fintech company Block lays off 4,000 of its 10,000 staff, citing gains from AI.
Shot: AI drives massive layoffs but Dorsey says he's not inhumane; people will have until Thursday to say goodbye before losing their slack and email.
✨New Perspective out w/ Wenning Deng and @fearbrain.bsky.social in @cp-iscience.bsky.social ! We argue that social foraging gives us a unifying, and ecologically grounded way to study how decisions unfold across levels — from individuals and dyads to collectives.
www.cell.com/iscience/ful...
Want to gain hands-on experience using STBayes?
Join our pre-conference workshop on 25/02, led by @mchimento.bsky.social 🤩
This paper is amazing, an early fav of mine in 2026. But who "previously thought [humans] to be solitary decision makers"? Not the authors of this (again, outstanding!) study. From the intro of their structured abstract: "Foraging decisions... are, therefore, likely influenced by social information"
If you’re a Master’s student interested in movement ecology, biologging, noise & conservation, join me and some great collaborators for an internship on how wind turbines and associated noise shape lesser kestrel (Falco naumanni) movement and behaviour.
“The theoretical idea of the loner as something that stabilizes the existence of the group is a very powerful one.” — self-organization researcher Fernando Rossine (From the archive)
