Bonfire night is here! Sending love to those sheltering with animal companions @wascherclaudia.bsky.social and I have new research out about the impacts fireworks have on urban corvids: ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v... And as video: youtu.be/dCfHEqJfx2A #BonfireNight #birds #crows #urbanwildlife

🧠🌟🐭 Excited to share some of my postdoc work on the evolution of dexterity! We compared deer mice evolved in forest vs prairie habitats. We found that forest mice have: (1) more corticospinal neurons (CSNs) (2) better hand dexterity (3) more dexterous climbing, which is linked to CSN number🧵

Researchers gave female canaries testosterone, which causes them to sing. Two-photon in vivo imaging reveals that songs emerge due to changes in brain cell function rather than by increasing the size of a key brain region, as was once thought. In PNAS: https://ow.ly/pn1750XhFL5

The songbird basal ganglia connectome https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.25.684569v1

Neophobia compared in 1,439 birds of 136 species Specialised diets and migration are associated with greater fear of new objects. Surprisingly, witnessing such objects in groups is also associated with greater fear. (paper) journals.plos.org/plosbiology/... (blog) phys.org/news/2025-10...

🦇 Bat nasal bones (turbinals) reveal how form follows function. Echolocating bats have simpler, plate-like turbinals, while fruit-eating bats show complex, scrolled ones—especially Cynopterus sphinx & Artibeus jamaicensis. King et al.: anatomypubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Fish suck... but species that feed on algae suck differently! 🐟 A new publication in Communications Biology by #UAFunMorph members Jana De Ridder, Peter Aerts, and Sam Van Wassenbergh, demonstrates how head motion patterns for generating suction are finetuned to the species' main diets.

We are asking working dogs to help by carrying loads & now @jamescharles90.bsky.social & co have discovered that burdened spaniels trot faster & stride farther, unlike shepherds and Labradors that slow down & are better suited to carry burdens in the long term journals.biologists.com/jeb/article/...

‼️📄 Two new papers out today in @jexpbiol.bsky.social lead by @jamescharles90.bsky.social, all about locomotion and load-carrying across different working dog breeds! ⤵️ 🐕 🏋️‍♂️ 🦮 (1/4)

Postdoc advertisement! Hi all, I'm looking to hire a Postdoc in BIOACOUSTICS for work on Owls. Your job would be to collect & analyze bioacoustics data, and write papers. 🦉🦉🦅🐦🦜🦉🦉

🚨 Hiring! We are looking for a postdoctoral researcher with expertise in computational fluid dynamics and structural simulations to investigate biomechanics and mechanosensory feedback in insect flight. Extreme agility ✔️ Morphological computing ✔️ Meshes! ✔️ jobs.rvc.ac.uk/vacancy.aspx...

Check out our new paper in @journalofanatomy.bsky.social! 🐇💀 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

New article out: The effects of sleep disturbance on a songbird’s vocal performance royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/... #science #birds #sleep #birdsong #urbanecology

Harry Gill first PhD paper is out, applying @deeplabcut.bsky.social to dog gait analyses ... and it worked pretty well :) You can access the paper here: authors.elsevier.com/c/1lXNEcF2Ow... @cbrassey.bsky.social

Review in #ProcB - After the fight: post-contest acoustic signalling #OpenAccess #Behaviour @andyradford.bsky.social royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

Our new review on numerical cognition in birds, just out in Nature Reviews Psychology! 🐦🧠 Behavior, neurobiology & field studies across avian species Very fond of the neurobiology part :) 📖 Read it here: rdcu.be/eyErI

The first papers from our special collection on vocal communication in corvids are now live. Most are still under review, stay tuned for more updates as they’re published! link.springer.com/collections/...

Nick Gladman @drnickgladman.bsky.social from our own @livevobiomech.bsky.social looked at how singing muscles age (and let me practice drawing birds!)

📣I’m hiring! Two weeks to apply for an October start. Start date is also flexible. #PhD #Morphology #evolution

Are you interested in bat vocalizations and the neural circuits that give rise to their emission?🦇🎶🧠 We reviewed the recent literature on neural activity underlying echolocation and communication calls across multiple bat species in Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences: doi.org/10.1111/nyas...

Semi-autonomous tracking algorithms: in situ measurements of fiber lengths & orientation in #chicken #embryo. Molnar‪ @crocodilejulia.bsky.social et al 2025 @anatrecord.bsky.social Quantifying #muscle architecture in embryos using diceCT and algorithmic fascicle tracking doi.org/10.1002/ar.7...

Despite rabbits being common lab models, their vertebral muscles were never fully described. 54 muscles were mapped in wild rabbits & hares, revealing key differences from other mammals & proposing leporid-specific terminology Taewcharoen et al: anatomypubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

go.bsky.app/8zZNEGV Great resource to connect early career folks with more senior scientists looking to hire postdocs! 🧪

📣 CALL FOR PAPERS 📣 We are happy to announce the third JAB Review Award competition! Submit your mini-review by 30 April 2026 Who: early career researchers up to 8 yrs after completition of doctorate More info: vist.ly/3n8ihr8 @NordicOikos.bsky.social

Feral rabbits exhibit morphologies as seen in domesticated or wild forms, but may also exhibit intermediate ones. Sherratt et al 2025 From wild to domestic and in between: how #domestication and #feralization changed the morphology of #rabbits @royalsocietypublishing.org doi.org/10.1098/rspb...

NONE in Life science?! NONE?!

New preprint out for those interested in simulation of muscle performance! ✌️

Hallooo, are you looking for a really cool MSc project in bioacoustics/evolution of communication/linguistics? Help me process our goldmine of birdsong recordings, and investigate whether and how conformance to various linguistic laws varies in the Anthus genus! 🔊 🐦🎵 docs.google.com/document/d/1...

Our new paper is out in Behavioral Ecology: “Neighbors affect vocal behavior of tropical wrens: a multispeaker density-manipulation experiment” http://doi.org/10.1093/beheco/arae075 Check out what we found (🧵1/5)

Eve Schneider & I wrote a @science.org Perspective on a striking new study by Zhang et al.: Read how a small genetic shift in a taste receptor, led to a big leap in ecological opportunity for birds 🍒🐦 🔗 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... #evolution #sensorybiology #taste #birds

Insights into the genetics underlying differences between (closely related) domesticated and wild songbirds (known to produce different songs): Work led by Madza Farias-Virgens, Stephanie White, @kazuookanoya.bsky.social, Emilia Huerta-Sanzhez & collaborators www.nature.com/articles/s42...

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

Excited to share our new preprint! Unlike the North American yellow warblers, females in Galápagos commonly sing and duet with their paired partners. Here, we tested possible functions with a playback experiment: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

How can we estimate the impacts of anthropogenic noise on auditory processing I'm other animals? Chou + Gall ask in "I Can't Hear You: Songbird Auditory Processing in Noise" Accepted in @jexpbiol.bsky.social journals.biologists.com/jeb/article/... #prattle 💬 #bioacoustics #neuroskyence 1/2

ETHOLOGY: Can chickadees tell who's calling? 🐦🎶🐦 Smeltz et al. show that black-capped chickadees can recognize individuals within two vocalization types (chick-a-dee calls & fee-bee songs), but not across them. Different sounds, different challenges! #OpenAccess 🔗 doi.org/10.1111/eth....

Published yesterday in @journalofanatomy.bsky.social with open access, we demonstrate how tiny slices of isolated bones (in this case, troodontid metatarsals) can provide a wealth of information on the growth, lifestyle, and injuries of these animals. (🧵) (Troodontid art by Henry Sharpe )

Turns out, two of pain’s most famous messengers — Substance P and CGRPα — might not be so essential after all. Mice missing both still felt pain just fine, challenging decades of assumptions about how pain signals travel. buff.ly/ypISrtx

Traffic Noise Provokes ‘Road Rage’ In Male Galápagos Warblers | @angliaruskinuni.bsky.social & University of Vienna, published by Animal Behaviour @animbehsociety.bsky.social by @grrlscientist.bsky.social #ornithology🪶 #birds🦉 #behavior #conservation🌎 #SciComm🧪 www.forbes.com/sites/grrlsc...

🦇👂🧠Our first bat paper is out! 🧠👂🦇 How do bats tell navigation from social calls? Led by the fearless Dr. Jenni Lawlor, we used 2P imaging to show that the auditory midbrain encodes categorical primitives. Check it out @natneuro.nature.com: rdcu.be/ehEgz

[Please share] 📢‼️ I have 2️⃣ postdoc positions advertised at the Swedish Museum of Natural History: Postdoc on "Theory of adaptive radiation" recruit.visma.com/spa/public/a... Postdoc on "Homoploid Hybrid Plant Genome Evolution" recruit.visma.com/spa/public/a...

The oVert Project, spearheaded by @floridamuseum.bsky.social, provides open access to a 3D scan collection containing 10,000+ vertebrate specimens covering over half of all amphibian, reptile, fish, and mammalian genera! 🧪 www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VqL... www.morphosource.org/projects/000...

#prattle 💬 #bioacoustics

Workshop and symposium on biomechanical simulation techniques for evolutionary morphology!! In Bordeaux!! 26th to 28th May!! Find out more and sign up here: www.eventbrite.fr/e/biomechani...

Convergent vocal representations in parrot and human forebrain motor networks (commonalities with speech-related motor cortices in humans found in budgerigar, but not in zebra finch, a songbird capable of more limited vocal learning) 🧪🧠🦜 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The songs styles of your youth are probably distinct from those of other generations, & the area you live may have a distinct dialect - this is a shared experience we have with birds 🐦‍⬛ New research from @nilomr.bsky.social @sheldonbirds.bsky.social @ox.ac.uk on how birdsong evolves 👇 bit.ly/41H2VDV

Hi Bluesky, we are looking for a PhD student for an interdisciplinary project on thermal imaging & welfare in hens. Applicants from diverse scientific backgrounds welcome -if you're interested in welfare, physiology, machine learning, imaging tech..get in touch :-) www.plymouth.ac.uk/study/resear...

PhD studentship funded by the Anatomical Society at the UCL Centre for Integrative Anatomy @ucl-c4ia.bsky.social. Studying the functional morphology of sheep, goats and their relatives including the fossil island dwarf Myotragus: www.findaphd.com/phds/project.... Contact me for more details.

Singing needs practice. Also for #birds! 🪶 Read the new post of my newsletter "Beaks & Bones" here: beaksandbones.substack.com/p/practice-m... You can subscribe for free to receive new posts directly in your inbox: beaksandbones.substack.com original study: www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧪

Thanks to @jexpbiol.bsky.social for shortlisting our JEB paper on syringeal muscle mecahnics for the 2024 Outstanding Paper prize! And congrats to all the other shortlistees and the winners! doi.org/10.1242/jeb.... Link to article: doi.org/10.1242/jeb....

Hard biting #birds are slow singers - which has more consequences than you might think! In my newest article, published in The Conversation, you can learn about how beak size affects the singing and #evolution of songbirds. 🪶 theconversation.com/hard-bites-a... #ornithology #scicomm #science