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...

Want to share this again because 1) the topic generates a lot of buzz. 2) Comparisons betw animal communication & human language benefits from considering some theoretical issues. @annajonand.bsky.social & I wrote this on recent claims on great ape "language". theconversation.com/animals-cant...

Funding opportunity in Sweden for researchers established outside Europe! We welcome project suggestions within Cultural Evolution for a one year visit at the Centre for Cultural Evolution, Stockholm University. Contact me if you are interested and feel free to share. www.vr.se/english/appl...

Great oppertunity for spending a year in Stockholm in a very innovative group!

Artportalen fyller 25 år!🎉 . En viktig källa till bra naturvård och fakta men även ren art-glädje. www.slu.se/artdatabanke...

12th ever ring-billed gull/ringnäbbad mås in Sweden. This one has been hanging out in central Stockholm for more than a week now (easiest to see in Kungsträdgården). #laridaerul #lovegulls

The world has decided, there are now 11,131 species of birds. Amazing effort and quite a milestone for science in terms of knowledge, effort, and outcome: birdsoftheworld.org/bow/news/avi...

This has been topical in my Grebe post today! #birds

Wrote a popular piece with @johanlind.bsky.social on why human language is so different from other animal communication. There’s a growing wave of studies suggesting key features of human language are present among animals. We propose a different perspective: theconversation.com/animals-cant...

The whole MDPI/Frontiers panic was just a distraction from what the real predators (Springer Nature, Elsevier, Wiley) have been cooking all along.

This applies to many fields fraught with speculation, here it's on "evolutionary foundations of biophilia": "Yet, without clear theoretical foundations, stable foundational concepts (‘nature’) & testable predictions, the framework risks losing its explanatory teeth." www.cell.com/trends/ecolo...

Fukano and Soga offered an interesting reply to our piece. We then had the chance to respond in turn. Our conclusion is clear: it's time to lay the biophilia hypothesis to rest once and for all. www.cell.com/trends/ecolo...

Regarding some recent grand claims about language-like capacities in other great apes, @annajonand.bsky.social & I wrote a piece addressing a few of these studies. We point out that well-known psychological limits may prevent language in other animals: theconversation.com/animals-cant...

Common tern-bonanza during the weekend in Stockholm <3. The new golden bridge at Slussen provides a strange background. #urbanbirds #urbanbirding #commonterns #terns

Why overstate & oversell instead of reporting what actually was found? This is not a study on communication. It concerns how chimpanzees hit trees ("drumming bouts") & includes no data on what effect this may have. Surface level similarities can be deceitful. Many frogs have better musical swag.

Interesting read on a current matter: "Combining Psychology with Artificial Intelligence: What could possibly go wrong?" osf.io/preprints/ps...

Vill bara nämna att det går utmärkt att lämna Spotify. Själv har jag flyttat alla spellistor till Tidal. Det gick smidigt pga tredjepartstjänst (bara att googla). Lärde mig i efterhand att visst hifi-folk föredrar Tidal pga "högre kvalitet", så ett byte kan ge dig möjligheter till skryt och snobberi

Wow.. its probably been over a year since this one was submitted, but its finally out! Herein we review HPAI across South America (and discuss the threat to Antarctic, prior to its arrival). 👉 conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

This is one of the wrongest* papers for a while. Our analysis showed that what Johnston et al. said was going on, wasn't going on; and what they said could not account for their data, could actually account for their data. *Bringing this word back into fashion journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1...