That's me! Thanks Kate!
What a great conference that was.
If anyone's interested here are the papers I spoke about at #ISBE2024 -
esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....
and
royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...
¿Sueñan las arañas? y ¿Con qué sueñan?
Acerca del sueño REM en las arañas, y cómo lo estudia el equipo de @RoesslerDaniela.bsky.social (quién dio una de mis charlas favoritas del #ISBE2024)
(vídeo)
One of the birds I most wanted to see in #Australia was the Tawny Frogmouth. Fortunately, #ISBE2024 delegates were sharing #BirdKnowledge and I was able to admire this beautiful mama on a nest in @Melbourne 😍🪶
#Birds #Birding #BirdsSeenIn2024
The Lizard Lab had a great week at ISBE in Melbourne a few weeks back. We had lab alumni, honorary and current members all give great talks! Well done everyone! #isbe2024
Had the best time at #ISBE2024! Always a pleasure to present this research 🌮🍆💦👋🦧, but even more fun to discuss it with awesome behavioural ecologists in such a welcoming setting!
Some fun #birding and wildfire spotting days after a great conference #ISBE2024 last week in Melbourne! 🐦🐦⬛🦜 the non-photographed ones including Australian little penguins and many parrots!
The reason is simple: not every prey is attacked every time a predator attacks someone. Below this threshold value for the trophic asymmetry, prey are predicted to be ahead.
It was really fun to be able to celebrate the acceptance of this paper at #ISBE2024, for once we were all in the same city!
Closing out the conference, Kavita Isvaran’s Hamilton Lecture shows her foundational work on female competition. Not just sexual role reversal, lots of females compete over resources and limited access to males.
#ISBE2024
Last talk! Laura Ryan models motion and shark visual systems, to show that surfers do in fact look a lot like seals. We’re going to need a bigger experiment to test how these shapes impact shark bites.
#ISBE2024
Mistaken identity! Laura Ryan shows that from a shark's perspective, man, do surfers and swimmers sure look a lot like the shark's typical pinniped prey #ISBE2024
How does risk of predation alter mating decisions? Viraj Torsekar shows bigger male and female isopods try to get the safer burrows forcing the smaller (less competitive) individuals to settle for risky burrows. Alters patterns of assortative mating! #ISBE2024
Robert Brooks is here to make a pitch to apply techniques from Behavioral Ecology to study deep machine learning. I’m going to just say that that’s a good idea and leave my thoughts on the comparison between early human v. animal exceptionalism and the skepticism around AI for later.
#ISBE2024
@Jordan_SMartin presents data supporting his Social Drive hypothesis. Feedbacks between fluctuating selection and social interactions promotes social plasticity. Tsimane women fertility better predicted by social interactions and IGEs than direct genetic effects #ISBE2024
As we all know (but not, like, from personal experience) physical combat is costly. Mohammadali Dashtbali shows that the optimal level of aggression does not depend on the honesty of signals. Lots of other cool stuff here, check out the paper!
#ISBE2024
Gabrielle Welsh studies the fantastic field cricket song evolution, shows clear differences based on location and lab vs field.
#ISBE2024
Sanele Nhlabatsi presents work documenting honey-hunting mutualism between humans and birds in Eswatini. Humans typically use instruments to bring in the birds, that guide the humans to a bee's nest and then give the birds a tasty reward #ISBE2024
Plenty of animals have quick copulation, but the half beaks do the deed in 40ms. When it comes to courtship though, males put in the time to assess and court females. John Fitzpatrick shows males prefer large gravid spots (b/c diet? Repro Cycle?)
#ISBE2024
Those beautiful cricket songs are great at attracting females. But on the island of Hawaii, these songs are also attractive to deadly parasotoids. @RobinMTing summarizes their work investigating how novel cricket morphs arise in response to these conflicting pressures #ISBE2024
Always tough to decide which talk to go to, but I followed people into Arezo Shamsgouara’s talk on male mate-copying in Pygmy Halfbeak. Males seem to prefer hanging out with male-female pairs.
#ISBE2024
Raphael Ritter is dissecting Hamilton’s rule in subsocial saw flies, which coordinate a sticky chemical defense. Large groups do better and are less impacted by cheating.
#ISBE2024
Megan Lambert turns to weightier matters showing that kea parrots quickly learn to discriminate (but not infer or remember?) object weight. This sort of thing is trivial for humans, but may actually tricky for many primates.
#ISBE2024
Gabby Jarvis is doing some adorable wallaby field work, showing that wallaby’s seem to respond to phantom decoys, switching away from similar foods.
#ISBE2024
Sonnie Flores partnered with a cool local boat guide to get years of video and acoustic data on crocodile vocalizations. Vocalizations vary (both in type and quality) based on sex and season.
#ISBE2024
Claire O’connel is here from the Hobson lab ( @elizabethhobson.bsky.social ) to share their amazing dissertation work in monk parakeets. Familiarity impacts (almost) all social behaviors, lots of cool details here.
#ISBE2024
Back to the conference! Everyone is stumbling in bleary-eyed after the rager last night, but Katherine Potter is catching our attention with flash colors and their effect on predation (in their assay, color certainly impacts something, but her fluffy predators just noticed them more)
#ISBE2024
Mimicry of host chicks by different cuckoo species
Can’t think of better way to kick off a sabbatical year than a week at ISBE2024 at Melbourne. Inspiring talks, great company and the best conference vibe. Thank you to the organisers for the invitation! 🙏🏽 (photo from the brilliant Naomi Langmore’s talk today) #isbe2024
Wild Caracas can figure out puzzle boxes for tasty morsels and seem to remember how to solve these tasks for at least a year. Clever birds! #ISBE2024
Richard Szeligowski shows that wolf spiders appear to have correlated responses to several potential threats (predators, smoke, pesticide). Possibly evidence of underlying "risk-aversion" axis? #ISBE2024
Rori Wijnhorst got over 200 sparrows to play producer-scrounger game to measure how social impact affects survival. However, even with such an impressive dataset he performed simulations to show he'd actually need well over 1,000 individuals to fully estimate selection #ISBE2024
