Don't just take my word for it ... @stephanielking.bsky.social and Denise Herzing provide insightful comments in this piece: www.sciencenews.org/article/ai-n...

Sometimes scientific papers surprise you. Info on new papers will appear below :) We have identified that non-hum animals struggle with remembering and using sequential information, in general. (See e.g. this TiCS paper and references therein: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...) 1/n

Oops, something fishy with the silver medal-winning photo of barn swallows, reward was removed last week. This photo from the competition Bird Photographer of the Year has disappeared from many sites, but has remained on this site (so far): www.forbes.com/sites/cecili... #bpoty #photography

07-Nov: On this day in 1913, Alfred Russel Wallace died. Wallace famously came up with a near-identical explanation for how evolution occurs independently of Charles Darwin. You can read about their friendship here: friendsofdarwin.com/articles/dar... #histsci

Is the psychology replication crisis (at last) catching up with animal cognition? "Our results indicate low statistical power and inflated effect sizes in both primary studies and meta-analyses." Preprint here: ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v...

Just submitted a book ms! An edited volume, edited together with super scientist @annajonand.bsky.social. Now I'm going #birding for the rest of the weekend <3 #submissionfriday

Another great PhD opportunity: An ERC-funded project on “Children as agents of cultural evolution,” lead by @sheinalew.bsky.social at Durham University. Come do fieldwork with Mayan groups in Belize with her, @dorsaamir.bsky.social, and I! One of three, 3-year PhD positions starting Fall 2026.

We highlighted the problem that arbitrarily chosen statistical models provides a heaven for cherry picking here journals.plos.org/plosone/arti.... Down propagation of "slicing errors" makes it all worse :o #brainevolution?

📢 We have an open position for a postdoc to join my lab. It's a great position @animecol-uu.bsky.social, fully salaried for 2.5 years with all benefits. www.uu.se/en/about-uu/... The project is about transmission patterns of bacteria and antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in aquatic insects. 🧬🦠 (1/3)

Same opinion here! Academics no longer engage in critical thinking, and their views are anything but intellectual. I'm old already, though and grumpy, especially about this.

Fun bet on scientific prediction :) Take-home message resonates well with ideas in #culturalevolution and #developmentalpsychology, mental skills take time to learn, need social input, & they don't mature spontaneously. Challenging to pinpoint their genetics. www.theatlantic.com/science/2025...

Vi hittade en artikel på F&F:s webb som satte myror i huvudet på oss. Vad ÄR detta, undrade vi. Den verkar inte ha tryckts i tidningen utan bara varit på webben. Det visar sig vara vinnaren i en tävling för skolelever, att skriva om en vetenskaplig expedition, "utan verklighetens begränsningar" 😁

Hi Bluesky, I need your help. Please share broadly: We have an EXCELLENT job opening. We are looking for a non-Brazilian visiting scholar who specializes in Genomics applied to animal evolution, biogeography, and/or biodiversity. This is a one-year contract that can be extended for up to 4 years.

This is an awe-inspiring and fascinating study that I thoroughly enjoyed reading. However, the overall framing in terms of "innate versus learned” is unnecessary. The innate versus acquired dichotomy is outdated and has been for a long time. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Now, that's a dataset! www.nature.com/articles/s41... #birds #bigdata

Am slowly making my way through this paper. And it is an impressive body of work by a collection of great researchers. However, I have a couple of problems with it... 1/n

#invertober 6, buff tip moth. branch animal #invertober2025

I usually don't do film tips, but if you're into birding (I think any kind of bird appreciation suffices), or subcultures, then Listers is not a bad documentary. #birding #birds #birdwatching youtu.be/zl-wAqplQAo?...

We got a reply on our Sequence Bottleneck-paper! Jacobs et al. argue that many observations go against our suggestion, see: www.cell.com/trends/cogni... Not surprisingly, I guess, we argue that their examples don't really cut to the chase. Our full response here: www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/di...

I get that the news cycle is packed right now, but I just heard from a colleague at the Smithsonian that this is fully a GIANT SQUID BEING EATEN BY A SPERM WHALE and it’s possibly the first ever confirmed video according to a friend at NOAA 10 YEAR OLD ME IS LOSING HER MIND (a thread 🧵)

I'll present this boyband today on a conference in Lund <3 #culturalevolution #learning

GUESS WHAT WEEK IT IS

Now in high impact journal, crows learn new behaviors through trial-and-error. Ignoring Skinner for now, let's reiterate Tinbergen in The Study of Instinct: Animals must learn to i) do new things, & to ii) refine existing behaviors. Our five cents on this: royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

A nice and thought-provoking paper by Ed Wassernan, on #mentalism and #behaviorism, and some cultural selection: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Apply for the Scripps Postdoctoral Fellowship! I'm looking to support a strong candidate in fish physiology and/or biomechanics. Deadline: Oct 9, 2025. Eligibility: PhD by Nov 30, 2026 with ≤3 years postdoc experience. 2 years, $74K salary, $6K research allowance 👉 apol-recruit.ucsd.edu/JPF04348 🧪 🐟

I'm still shook by this, it's like 5 mice taking down a lion, but the lion can fly 😳

This should have been big news! Ten funding agencies from eight European countries have pledged to support a public infrastructure that is poised to replace academic journals: FWF 🇦🇹 RCN 🇳🇴 Forte 🇸🇪 ARIS 🇸🇮 SRC 🇸🇪 FCT 🇵🇹 CSIC 🇪🇸 DFG 🇩🇪 Formas 🇸🇪 ANR 🇫🇷 Only two of them issued press releases in […]

#SeabirdSeptember - thankful for another finished fieldseason and no #HPAI casualties among the great skuas on Skúgvoy #SkuaIsland #seabirds

Vi, Naturfotograferna.se, har fått massor av stöd för att lyfta frågan om skogen. Det blir utomhusutställning som kommer belysa det storskaliga industriella skogsbrukets effekter på klimatet, biologiska mångfald, landskapet och människan. #gillaskog #vårskog postkodstiftelsen.se/projekt/skog...

Lovely surprise in the post today - a hard copy of the Oxford Handbook of Cultural Evoltuon, superbly edited by @rachkendal.bsky.social @jeremykendal.bsky.social and Jamie Tehrani, featuring a chapter by @simonreader.bsky.social and I on Innovation!

Where do some of Reinforcement Learning's great thinkers stand today? Find out! Keynotes of the RL Conference are online: www.youtube.com/playlist?lis... Wanting vs liking, Agent factories, Theoretical limit of LLMs, Pluralist value, RL teachers, Knowledge flywheels (guess who talked about which!)

What a sensational science story about an almost mythical beast from @carlzimmer.com www.nytimes.com/2025/08/25/s...

Erfarenheterna från USA, där jag verkade i 20 år, säger mig att vi borde protesterat högre, och tidigare, mot alla tendenser i auktoritär riktning. Låt oss inte göra samma misstag här hemma.

I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news. "Sweden has vast 'old growth' forests – but they are being chopped down faster than the Amazon" theconversation.com/sweden-has-v...

Anyways, it's Friday www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2012-0...

Unfortunately behind paywall, but in this piece I talked to Ben Crair (the journalist) about #associativelearning, #animalintelligence, and problems in #animalcognition research where lots of learning knowledge often is neglected: www.technologyreview.com/2025/08/18/1... #learning

A bit late on this, but here we explore how cultural information can guide development of behavior & cognitive skills just like genes. Can cultural evolution result in teaching trajectories that promote incremental acquisition of complex tasks? #culturalevolution #developmentalpsychology #modelling

Read our latest paper on the trends and statuses of #biologicalinvasions worldwide. Led by @hannoseebens.bsky.social , L Meyerson, P Pyšek and D Richardson and ~60 other coauthors, and based on Chap2 of the #IAS #IPBES Report, it has all the basic info you need! A MUST READ! doi.org/10.1111/brv....

So excited to share our massive review on #alienspecies, now published! It was an honor to collaborate with a team of 65 authors on this project. We show how #biologicalinvasions are accelerating globally and what we still need to learn to halt them. 👾 #BiologicalReviews #Ecology #IPBES

the flip-flop of organisms during the Anthropocene #omg

Happy #worldelephantday!

I hadn't seen one of these strange children in a minute and forgot they had been identified to genus, Heterospilus: www.inaturalist.org/taxa/250318?...

🚨 New, short article by myself, Clark Barrett and @kevinlala.bsky.social on the legacy of Wilson's 'Sociobiology: The New Synthesis', which was published 50 years ago. @science.org #ehbea #histbiol #evobio #psyscisky Revisiting the human sociobiology debate |Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

There's a lot of hype in animal cognition today. In this @royalsocietypublishing.org paper we go back to basics & look at sequential aspects of animal intelligence. This makes evolutionary sense & has consequences for how we interpret animal behavior. royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10....

Cool Red-footed-booby's-eye view footage! 👀

"Commuting in crosswinds and foraging in fast winds: the foraging ecology of a flying fish specialist" 💨🐦🐟 New @iomarinescience.bsky.social research out now in @royalsocietypublishing.org: doi.org/10.1098/rspb... 📸 @robinfreeman.bsky.social 🧪🌍🪶

🌍Discover the State of the World’s Birds!🦜 Our 2025 annual update is now live! It summarises key insights in conservation science, spotlighting emerging trends and inspiring progress. Explore the full update here 👉 datazone.birdlife.org/articles/sta... #BirdConservation

Companion piece in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social to our recent @nathumbehav.nature.com paper, in which we put our "Social feature learning" model of social learning strategies in context.

New paper! @johanlind.bsky.social and I examine both sequential input representation and sequential output in non-human animals. We question the use of complex anthropocentric models in cases where simpler models based on associative learning make more accurate predictions. doi.org/10.1098/rstb...