dipping my toes into producing again 🎧 took a sample from puppy love by danish artist erica de casier (which is amazing by itself) and flipped it soundcloud.com/theque_cache...

New paper! We propose a framework to empirically study animal social relationships by modelling social network (SN) data as time-series—that is, without the need to aggregate them over time. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

New amazing open Postdoc position, w/t opportunities to 1) get closely involved in our next @themanybirds.bsky.social study on innovation and problem-solving; 2) work with @ecobird.bsky.social on avian innovation, cognition & invasiveness. Advert: www.ugent.be/en/work/scie...

🚨 Come join the fantastic long-tailed tit team 🚨 🐦We are recruiting a field technician to collect behavioural data on a long-term studied population of wild long-tailed tits (passerine birds). 🪶20 months contract in Sheffield, UK. 🌲Deadline: 23/11/2025. jobsite.sheffield.ac.uk/job/Technici...

A special type of fishing takes place in southern Brazil: dolphins drive the prey into the net. The fishermen work so closely together that even their heart rates synchronise. Discovered by a research team led by #UniKonstanz @cbehav.bsky.social biologist @hanjabrrr.bsky.social: t1p.de/d56g3

recorded a frenetic, genre swerving Halloween mix over the weekend 🎧 trying to up my gif game youtu.be/mf_Ct44rus0?... #dj

Social relationships promote access to food and information in wild jackdaws https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.25.684536v1

Social relationships are powerful predictors of fitness across social animals. But *why*? In our new @cp-trendsecolevo.bsky.social paper, we outline testable predictions for why relationship quality and quantity adaptively vary across socio-ecological contexts. tinyurl.com/55dnkeh7

Also, our first workshop on cultural evolution at #alife2025: thanks to invited speakers James Borg and @uchiyama.bsky.social for their talks in session 1! In session 2, we had an interactive generative game with some creative creatures and cultures emerging. Thanks to all who came along 👾🫟🦠

"Dunbar's Number" is a zombie that lives forever in the science press it seems. Estimates of Dunbar's Number with 95% intervals, for a range of model specifications (from doi.org/10.1098/rsbl... ):

loudly thinking "wtf are you talking about" while reading a paper

🦅PhD position 🦅 in my new group at @fbm-unil.bsky.social in Switzerland, studying how the social and resource landscapes shape the learning process for soaring flight. Deadline: Oct 30. Pls repost! career5.successfactors.eu/career?caree...

Today is #alife2025 day 1! Workshops under way... We have our own workshop tmw on Cultural Evolution of Planet X, 13.30-16.30, room 4F. Exciting keynotes from James Borg and @uchiyama.bsky.social. Join us!

#COSMOS2025 in Tokyo concluded last night with the epic farewell party with DJ Thèque Cachée (@mchimento.bsky.social)! Thank you all brilliant COSMOnauts for coming from all over the world and creating this wonderful community. Have a safe trip back home. See you again soon!

ACE Teaching Innovation Awards empower scholars to incorporate high-quality cultural evolution course materials into their teaching. This is a great opportunity for those from majority-world countries and ECR academics, but everyone can apply! culturalevolutionsociety.org/grants-and-a...

Most people are right- some left-handed or ambidextrous - and so are honey buzzards when turning in thermals! But, unlike us, mastering flight means these birds must overcome laterality as they grow. A gem of a preprint led by @enourani.bsky.social. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Here we propose adding an 11th criterion to UNESCO’s framework to protect animal cultures—habitat protection alone isn’t enough. Excited to collaborate with philosophers @merikatariina.bsky.social & @birchlse.bsky.social on this! Message me for access ;-) www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🚨 Last days to submit! 🚨 Join the Workshop on Cultural Evolution of Planet X at @alife2025.bsky.social (Kyoto, Oct 7). We welcome abstracts on cultural evolution and emergent culture in artificial systems. Work presented elsewhere too! 📅 Deadline: Sept 20 🔗 sites.google.com/view/planetx...

Abstract submission now open for the next Cultural Evolution Society conference in Rabat, Morocco next May @culturalevolsoc.bsky.social @ces2026.bsky.social

Celebrating the publication of our big collaborative spatial-social meta-analysis of density-dependent transmission effects, out now in Nature Eco Evo! doi.org/10.1038/s415... (or rdcu.be/eD6eB)

This is fascinating: www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/s/I... Someone “worked on a book with ChatGPT” for weeks and then sought help on Reddit when they couldn’t download the file. Redditors helped them realized ChatGPT had just been roleplaying/lying and there was no file/book…

Journal publishers *are* bundling your papers up in "data licensing agreements" for big tech companies to use for AI model training. Our publisher, T&F, got £75m from Microsoft for that last year alone.

why is it that on 🤌Italian🤌 highways, every 5 km there is construction that consists of 3-4 km of cones, an odd pile of rubble, and no obvious improvement? it feels like a scam but what is the scam? does the EU provide a set amount of funding per roadwork? what's the deal

🧠 Want to integrate cultural evolution into your course using award winning materials created by the field's experts, and get paid $2000 to do it? 💵 🚨 The Cultural Evolution Society is seeking applications for the ACE Teaching Innovation Awards. 🔖 Apply here: vuw.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...

New @cornishjackdaws.bsky.social paper out today in @royalsociety.org Biology Letters. We found adult jackdaws can learn to tolerate usually bullied or ignored juveniles when they provided information about a new foraging resource. royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

A cool workshop on cultural evolution in ALife, happening right after the #COSMOSSummerSchool in Tokyo! Stretch your stay in Japan to attend ALIFE in Kyoto too!!

some 🧊liquid dnb🧊 for this heatwave youtu.be/1YcTtrUOwCM #dj mix

📣 Interested in cultural evolution and artificial life? Call for abstracts for our upcoming workshop at @alife2025.bsky.social. Accepted abstracts will be presented as flash talks, and are not archival. Deadline is the September 12, w/ rolling acceptance. Details: sites.google.com/view/planetx... 🧪

New mini mix, v proud of the thumbnail on this one youtu.be/odrx1QsFlVo

Really cool study looking at how behaviour precedes morphological change across taxa - and implications for human evolution 💀🧪 massive congrats to all the authors, including @vivek123.bsky.social www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Really pleased to see Daisy Abraham’s first paper out. About something we know very little about: what happens when birds “divorce”. We had extensive discussion with one reviewer about whether this was the appropriate term to use. “Permanent breaking of pair bond” feels too much of a mouthful…

I'm happy to share our latest manuscript "Impediments to countering racist pseudoscience", coauthored with @gillianrbrown1.bsky.social @kztwyman.bsky.social & Marcus Feldman.

To finish the second day of the Konstanz School of Collective Behaviour 2025 (#KSCB2025), a great #tutorial by Michael Chimento @mchimento on #Network-Based #Diffusion #Analysis (#NBDA) and his #RPackage #STbayes. @cbehav.bsky.social#kscb2025#tutorial#diffusion#analysis#nbda#rpackage#stbayes://www.exc.uni-konstanz.de/kscb/

💥 Our new paper (with ‪@lucasmolleman.bsky.social and ‪@bjornlindstrom.bsky.social‬) is now out in @nathumbehav.nature.com‬ 🥳 www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧠 Here, we advance a novel RL account—the Social Feature Learning (SFL) model—that explains how people learn to learn from others! 🤝 🧵👇

You want us to do what now? The first steps of Lara training Sydney's wild cockatoos on how to play a touchscreen task... We've found that it take about 2-3 weeks for cockies to go from these first steps to using the full apparatus, which we can then use to test individuals' cognitive abilities.

New paper out in the lab on collective gaze following in pigeons in iScience! Coolest experimental design ever🤭

Hi Bluesky! 👋 We're the account for the Clever Cockie Project, researching culture and cognition in urban sulphur-crested cockatoos. We'll post updates from the field, along with our recent results and publications. You can find more, including our current team, here: www.clevercockies.com/the-team

Now "The development of turn-taking skills" is officially out in Cognitive Science: dx.doi.org/10.1111/cogs.70082 (and preprint still here: osf.io/preprints/ps...). See the thread below for a quicker insight on the findings!

When do leaves know the trunk cracked in half

In our new paper we discuss the coevolution of cognition and sociality (link: royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...). It was a pleasure to work on this project with Andoni Sergiou, @josharbon.bsky.social, @inesfuertbauer.bsky.social, @shoalgroup.bsky.social, and @cornishjackdaws.bsky.social!

Applications now open for UNIL Summer School on Modelling for Evo Bio (1–6 Sept 2025, Lausanne)! Aimed at PhD students interested in formal approaches to evolutionary ecology questions like sexual selection, social & life-history evolution. Scholarships available. Pls share! www.shorturl.at/znk5g

Excited to announce I'll be giving a workshop on creating Bayesian models of social transmission at @royalholloway.bsky.social Centre for Decision Sciences Summer School taking place from Sept 8-12th (center-decision-sciences.com/cds-summer-s...)

First as tragedy, then as farce. And then as farce, and again as farce.

📖Published📖 Chimento et al., develop a 3D Synchronized Outdoor Camera System (3D-SOCS): an inexpensive, mobile and automated method for collecting behavioural data on wild animals using synchronized video frames from Raspberry Pi controlled cameras 📸 🌍 🧪 buff.ly/4nr5m4y

Capturing the behaviour of animals in their natural habitat with high detail? #UniKonstanz @cbehav.bsky.social researchers developed a unique outdoor camera system to measure 3D movements and postures of wild birds: https://t1p.de/m0kzr

When it rains, it pours--super happy to see this published today!

been a long time coming, there's now a preprint along with Will Hoppitt describing our new R package for creating, fitting and interpreting bayesian NBDA models (STBayes). www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1.... Documentation is here michaelchimento.github.io/STbayes/inde...

Been a minute but found some time to put together a new mix 🎧 Some old faves and some addicting songs on my rotation these days. youtu.be/HEvz071-JnU?...

👇 New #preprint combining computational models with zebbie data: "Dynamic strategic social learning in nest-building zebra finches and its generalisability". 🔗 doi.org/10.1101/2025... 🧵1/n

Out today in Biology Letters - mate copying is not limited to Drosophila melanogaster. It´s sister species D. simulans does it too! We tested females from 3 populations and they all copied. This suggests that this strategy may be more widespread 🪰 royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...