Beautiful rainbow from the new Life and Mind Building @biology.ox.ac.uk - it’s been great moving in ☺️

Come and work with us! Three new academic posts (including Animal Behaviour) and superb facilities in the new Life & Mind Building

Water quality at Wolvercote Mill Stream is the worst since records began, according to Environment Agency testing. As a designated bathing site, water is tested for e. coli and intestinal enterococci which usually get into water from sewage & animal manure. environment.data.gov.uk/bwq/profiles...

I am beyond excited to announce that ggplot2 4.0.0 has just landed on CRAN. It's not every day we have a new major #ggplot2 release but it is a fitting 18 year birthday present for the package. Get an overview of the release in this blog post and be on the lookout for more in-depth posts #rstats

Are you studying animal sociality? Confused about the "non-independence" of social network data: what on earth are they? are they threatening your results? should you attempt to get rid of them? A thread summarising a part of our new paper (ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v...).

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)

Why do speciation rates vary across the tree of life? Some of the best yet most underappreciated places for this investigation are natural hybrid zones. This preprint takes you to the hybrid zones in the origin of species to find a clue. 👉 shorturl.at/N7FXE #Speciation #Evolution #hybridization

"It took her nearly two decades to find a permanent academic position. She found occasional work as a visiting professor, filling in for someone on leave for a year or two. She earned grants to fund her research... but she was often living on unemployment benefits" www.nytimes.com/2025/08/29/s...

Survey alert! If you're a social behavioural ecologist, please fill in our survey aimed at gauging interest in, barriers and solutions to, comparative social behaviour research. Thanks! forms.gle/KZJDMtLCJhvY...

Hannah Lemon gave a very clear and interesting talk about social inheritance of social relationships from mothers to their daughters and sons (to a lesser extent) in the Rum red deer @rumdeerresearch.bsky.social. @behaviour2025.bsky.social @asab.org

Fantastic new job, advert now live - Associate Professor in Animal Behaviour, Dept Biology, Oxford. Closing date 8th Oct. Come and join us! my.corehr.com/pls/uoxrecru...

@devisatarkar.bsky.social gave beautiful talk on the extent to which social network traits are heritable vs. shaped by the spatial & social environment at birth using long-term data on blue tits 🐣🧬 @behaviour2025.bsky.social @asab.org

Whoever heard of birds splitting up? A new study from @biology.ox.ac.uk and Leeds researcher Dr Josh Firth reveals wild great tits show signs of 'divorce' months before breeding season. 🔎 Vital clues to social relationships in not just birds, but other species too. bit.ly/4fLH3Nb @ox.ac.uk

Final words of the last #ESEB2025 plenary by @jmappes.bsky.social: "Science moves forward when we keep both our curiosity and our humility"

Thank you so much! Hoping to get a preprint out this autumn before the end of the year ☺️🤞

Excited to be at ESEB 2025 in Barcelona! Presenting a poster on my first chapter (with my supervisors Josh Firth and Sarah Knowles) today between 5-7 pm, so come along say hi! Happy to chat about the friendship paradox and animal social networks ☺️ @eseb2025.bsky.social

🚨Very happy that my PhD work is now out in @nature.com! We discovered that evolution, by acting in the midbrain, shifted the threshold to escape in Peromyscus mice, to fine-tune defensive strategies in different environments www.nature.com/articles/s41... This was a truly collaborative effort! 🧵⬇️

Ever wondered how animals know where they are? Or how they find where they need to be? The answer is that they have maps and compasses built into their heads! Excited to see this new review of map-and-compass navigation led by Joe Morford out in Animal Behaviour @asab.org doi.org/10.1016/j.an...

The "reproducibility crisis" in science constantly makes headlines. Repro efforts are often limited. What if you could assess reproducibility of an entire field? That's what @brunolemaitre.bsky.social et al. have done. Fly immunity is highly replicable & offers lessons for #metascience A 🧵 1/n

New paper in Evolution Letters @evolletters.bsky.social by an undergrad in my lab! academic.oup.com/evlett/advan... We modeled eco-evo dynamics of infection & immunity and then analyzed 50 years of data from stickleback & tapeworms (thanks to museum samples!)

New preprint: Using pedigree data + genomics from 2,684 great tits in Wytham Woods, we explore spatial genetic structure and the role of dispersal, population turnover and immigration 🐦 With @sheldonbirds.bsky.social @nilomr.bsky.social @jon-slate.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

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!

Really enjoying my new job teaching Biology in London, but the sunny weather has me missing the early Wytham mornings during the field season 🌳 An old video I made of the '23 field season working for @egioxford.bsky.social & @biology.ox.ac.uk takes me back: www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-rm...

Excellent @egioxford.bsky.social seminar by @mattjsilk.bsky.social this afternoon on wide range of issues on evolution & social networks. Check out Nergal! thentrythis.org/projects/ner...

How did I miss this great blog post (and Bluesky post) from @bharrap.bsky.social? As you might expect, I would have lots to say about variable naming conventions. 😄 My favorite line from the blog post: What makes a bad naming convention? #1 Not using a convention 😉 benharrap.com/post/2025-03...

Great to present at #ASABSpring2025 🤞 to finishing the manuscript soon!

Just over a month left to record the #mistletoe in your area via the MistleGO survey! Find out more here: treecouncil.org.uk/science-and-...

🎉 New blog post! Trying to kick-start my blog in 2025 with a roundup of thing's I've learnt in R (or at least try as a series!)

Lovely to see Devi Satarkar’s first DPhil paper out in print

Birds have complex social lives; they pair-up, divorce and repair, but we know very little about when and how these relationships form. New work from Daisy Abraham & Josh Firth on Wytham Woods Great Tits shows that divorce happens early - probably soon after breeding www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Behaviors and reproductive characteristics may evolve faster than other traits, thanks to the genetic effects of social interactions doi.org/10.1093/evle... Now in @evolletters.bsky.social by Francesca Santostefano, Maria Moiron, Alfredo Sánchez-Tójar, and David N Fisher