#ASABWinter2025 was awesome! Loads of really cool animal behaviour research and great to be there with Ben Bluck (PhD in our group) and @helenalcurrie.bsky.social. Enjoyed being able to share some of our work on light pollution and fish with a great audience 🌆🐟

Artificial light at night is increasing in extent and brightness. It appears that such light can affect things like route choice and daytime activity in freshwater fish 🐠 💡 #ASABWinter2025

🧵1/9 There are 35,000+ fish species, but we have formal social-behaviour classifications for a tiny fraction. Most knowledge lives in the experience of researchers, fishers, divers, aquarists, naturalists, and Indigenous communities, but almost none of it is centralised. So we built ShoalBase.org.

📣Fully Funded PhD Opportunity at the University of Portsmouth💧 Explore how early childhood routines shape lifelong water habits, and how that understanding can help tackle water scarcity and protect ecologically sensitive and globally unique freshwater environments 🌍

🎧 #PhDOpportunity🌿🐟 Fully funded PhD using AI and acoustic technologies to track freshwater biodiversity recovery — from chalk stream restoration in Hampshire to ghost pond resurrection in Norfolk. 💧 Apply now 👉 www.trees-dla.ac.uk/projects/lis... 📅 Deadline: 5pm (UK time), 17th December 2025

Wessex Rivers Trust is seeking a passionate & experienced Chair to guide their Board in their mission to restore & protect the amazing rivers of Wessex See WRT website lnkd.in/ej3vdmEy Nurole lnkd.in/eUhwjpEu #CharityLeadership #charitygovernance #Trustees #EnvironmentalLeadership #Loveyourrivers

✅Home tanks setup for simulating light pollution ✅Fish settled in ✅Model predator (kingfisher) constructed ✅Experimental tanks setup My @asab.org funded project investigating the impact of #lightpollution on collective anti-predator response in fish is finally in full swing 😁🌆🐟

Interesting first day of talks at the #FSBI2025 conference. Great talk by Ben (Bluck) from our research group on European eel response to light within a "passage" context.

Really enjoyed day 2 of the #UFAW2025 conference, especially presenting my (@ufaw.bsky.social funded) work on how environmental enrichment in husbandry tanks can influence fish passage performance at river infrastructure (in the lab) #AnimalWelfare #AnimalWelfareScience

🐟 At the #UFAW2025 conference today, Andrew Vowles @unisouthampton.bsky.social‬ shared a fascinating fish study revealing that being housed with enrichment (shelters, substrate) affected their later exploration of novel objects and willingness to swim upstream and cross barriers. #animalwelfare

Can you help? Could you spare time to take part in this survey, which aims to investigate perceptions on human-generated noise and light pollution in marine and freshwater environments. Take part here: aquaplan-project.eu/aquaplan-sur...

Back in the warm office after measuring water velocities for a student project at a cylindrical bristle cluster (CBC) #fishpass - a fish passage solution for sloped weirs. We've tested mostly in the lab (see link in 🧵) so nice to get some field data 🙂🐟

The impact of reintroduced Eurasian beaver (Castor fiber) dams on the upstream movement of brown trout (Salmo trutta) in upland areas of Great Britain journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

24% of freshwater fauna threatened with extinction ! 👉 By Sayer et al. Jan 2025 in Nature www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🔑 Multi-taxon global IUCN red list freshwater fauna (23,496 species) assessment shows that pollution, dams, water extraction, agriculture and invasion are the main threats. 🌐🌍

Right, back to it! Things to get stuck into this week: #dataanalysis, #fieldwork, #bidwriting... Let's see how long this new year motivation lasts 😉

Major new research finds “shockingly” fast changes to flows of Earth’s c. 3 million rivers, mapped across 35 years. “Rivers are dynamic and beautiful beasts & humans should never take them for granted or squander the resources they provide us with.” (Hannah Cloke) www.cnn.com/2024/12/12/c...

Long-term data is critical for understanding how ecosystems work and how they might look in the future. But it's getting harder and harder to do due to funding limitations. We need to prioritise this sort of research and to stop cutting funding for it.

🚨Fully-Funded PhD Alert! 🚨 Want to join the @unisouthampton.bsky.social Leverhulme Resilience Centre? This project, supervised by me, @profjulianleyland.bsky.social and Dr Nick Dorward, explores links between sand mining, urbanisation and river-related risks: www.southampton.ac.uk/study/postgr...

Two unique opportunities for fully funded interdisciplinary PhD research on #biodiversity #conservation @Uni_of_Essex, blending #ecology with #sociology and #business as part of the @leverhulme.bsky.social Sustainable Transitions programme jobs.ac.uk/job/DKT611/p... jobs.ac.uk/job/DKT503/p...

Data analysis day - trout response to novel object (🐖). Some fish not bothered. Others really don't like the pig. Is this related to the different husbandry / enrichment environment the fish were held under 🤔. Time will tell. #fishwelfare @animalta.bsky.social working well for the tracking 🙂

Was hoping for a blue sky for my first post, but alas, it's fieldwork in November, in England. So grey sky and rain it is. Scouting potential salmon spawning sites for a project this winter with @helenalcurrie.bsky.social 🐟