Join us (November 26th 4 PM Hong Kong Time) for our final project meeting (online) about the Hong Kong feral water buffalo 🐃 project. Check out www.hkbuffaloresearch.org/research-hig... for free registration or scan QR code on the poster. We welcome everyone!! @amcell.bsky.social

The conference is next week!✨ Join us on 13–14 November for a rich two-day schedule of fascinating talks on animal behaviour 🦋🐟🐆 💻 Free, online & open to all worldwide 👉 Explore the program and register 🔗 ablaoc25.sciencesconf.org/resource/pag...

Very timely special issue! If you’re working on how human altered environments impact social cognition (social learning, decisions in a context, communication…) or how social cognition can help deal with the challenges and opportunities of human altered environnements, consider submitting!

🐃🐦 Interested in how feral buffalo & cattle affect bird communities in Hong Kong? Join our research team (@amcell.bsky.social, Prof. Kate Flay & me) at CityU HK through the DAAD RISE Paid Internship for German students. Apply: shorturl.at/LvDe3 | Ref: HK_BI_0704| |📧: [email protected]

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

Happening in 1 week: October 23rd, from 4 to 5.30pm Hong Kong time (UTC+8) or 10 to 11.30 Central European time (UTC+2)! Still time to register using the QR code on the poster below 😄 Looking forward to sharing the outcome of my four years of PhD research on the Hong Kong feral cattle 🐂

📣 Are you interested in applied animal ethology and perceptual abilities of animals? Do you want to help us disentangle how animal emotions are modulated by their sensory environment? Then, you might be the postdoc we are looking for🌠 More info: www.slu.se/en/about-slu... #appliedethology #postcoc

🐦 Exciting news! Our new paper is out in PLOS Biology: “A large-scale study across the avian clade identifies ecological drivers of neophobia.” Led by the #ManyBirds Project - 129 researchers, 82 institutions, 24 countries 🌍 🔗 journals.plos.org/plosbiology/... @themanybirds.bsky.social

Does playfulness support a cooperative and tolerant society? A new study links play, tolerance, and empathy in elephants.

🦅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...

2025. Veterinary college sheds light on lives of Lantau’s water buffalo - cc @debottam1991.bsky.social croucher.org.hk/en/news/vete...

Do you love research & writing & all things animal behavior? Well our journal, Animal Behavior, recruiting up to 5 (count em!) new Associate Editors! Editors serve three-year terms beginning January 2026. If you're interested, email Exec Editor Scott Sakaluk ([email protected]) by Oct 31!

@ghodgson.bsky.social and I will present our PhD research on October 23rd, 4 to 5.30pm HK time Zoom is open for all and in-person attendance is available for staff and students of City University of Hong Kong. Scan the QR code or use the following link to register docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Interested in the feral cattle of Hong Kong? @tania-perroux.bsky.social and I will be talking about our PhD research next month; for more information and to register, check out the poster below! 👀🐂☀️

You can find out more about HK feral cattle phenotypes in our paper royalsocietypublishing-org/doi/10.1098/..., and learn more about this unique populations on our website hkcattleresearch.org And let us know your thought about our findings 😀

We present the first evidence of seasonal coat colour changes in cattle, with paler individuals in the wet season and darker ones in the dry season, suggesting plastic phenotypes. The main driver of seasonal coat colour appears to be thermoregulation, supporting the thermal melanism hypothesis.

Our latest feral cattle paper “Seasonal changes in coat colour and sexual size dimorphism in a subtropical ungulate” is out today in open access @royalsociety.org Royal Society Open Science royalsocietypublishing-org/doi/10.1098/... by myself, Kate Flay, @ghodgson.bsky.social & @amcell.bsky.social

Accepting applications for Graduate Students! PhD & MSc I am seeking highly motivated individuals to join my research team. Application details here: https://bit.ly/4mlBd6x Deadline 01 Dec 2025 Please share widely! (1/3) 1/3

The #MaxPlanckPostdocProgram offers a guaranteed contract of at least 3 years, targeted mentoring, and career workshops. The call for applications is open now! 🚀 Take advantage of this opportunity and browse the job vacancies. www.mpg.de/en/max-planc...

🚨 PhD position in behavioural evolution 🚨 Come do your PhD with me in Linköping, Sweden, using the domestic dog (and some wolves) to answer fun questions on how complex behaviours develop and evolve. Application deadline September 24 2025 🧪 🌍 🦊 #AcademicSky #ScienceJobs liu.se/en/work-at-l...

Social status predicts self-directed behaviors, contingent on broader social dynamics https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.08.11.669676v1

Reliability and precision of thermal imaging measurements to study animal behaviour and welfare https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.07.31.668027v1

We found that feral cattle were more likely to intervene in allogrooming interactions if they had a strong social bond with one animal but not the other, dominant animals were more likely to be successful interveners, and that allogrooming duration increased when more cattle were nearby.

Very excited to announce that our latest feral cattle paper “Strategic third-party interventions in feral ungulate affiliation” is out today in @royalsociety.org Proceedings of the Royal Society B royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/... by myself, Kate Flay, Tania Perroux & @amcell.bsky.social

This indicates that cattle pay attention to their social surroundings, and selectively interrupt bonding behaviour. These nuanced social relationships and third-party effects are often only associated with non-human primates, and not usually with livestock such as cattle.

Understanding how ungulates maintain #socialbonds is important for #positiveanimalwelfare and highlights the complex social lives and cognitive abilities of cattle. To learn more about the study, visit royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/... or our website hkcattleresearch.org 🐂

Wild Buffalo Divide Hong Kong Neighbors in Surprising Ways In the marshlands of Hong Kong's South Lantau Island, where skyscrapers give way to wetlands, roughly 115 feral water buffalo have become unlikely neighbors to humans—and opinions about these massive ungulates are as diverse as the city…

Plain speaking to help save the remaining 115 free ranging water buffalo in Hong Kong 😍 🐃 @amcell.bsky.social relationalthinkingblog.com/2025/06/17/p...

If you visit Hong Kong, it's well worth taking a boat to Lantau to see the feral buffalo - they are incredible 🐃🐃🐃 (Last year I was so lucky to visit them together with the team behind this brilliant work!)

Press release of our @peopleandnature.bsky.social paper (besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/25758314...) 🐃 ⬇️ www.eurekalert.org/news-release...

New paper out in @peopleandnature.bsky.social @britishecologicalsociety.org besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/... (1/6) As cities grow and landscapes evolve, people are increasingly finding themselves sharing space with wildlife, which brings both challenges and opportunities.

Muddy buddies 🐃 Stay tuned for our upcoming publication on public attitudes and values regarding feral water buffalo in Hong Kong. See our research website ⬇️ hkbuffaloresearch.org

For more information about the Hong Kong feral cattle and our (Prof Alan McElligott @amcell.bsky.social, Tania Perroux, Prof Kate Flay) ongoing research, find the project online at hkcattleresearch.org

Higher-ranking animals performed more affiliation and had more affiliative partners, with males directing affiliation preferentially towards females. Dominance, sex, group size and supplementary provisioning all affected aggression, with provisioned animals receiving more aggression. 4/5

Our new feral cattle behaviour paper “Fighting and friendship: sociodemographic factors and provisioning affect feral cattle behaviour” is now available open access online at #AnimalBehaviourJournal @asab.org www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... 1/5

SFB Paper Alert! That’s teamwork: 14 SFB members across nine projects put together a perspective paper on “Computer vision for primate behavior analysis in the wild”, which was published in @naturemethods.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

To celebrate our new #MacaqueNet paper, I wrote a blog for @animalecology.bsky.social. This #StoryBehindThePaper shares how we came together to build the first standardised macaque social behaviour database! animalecologyinfocus.com/2025/04/10/m... #Macaques #BigTeamScience #ComparativeResearch

Using the BISoN R package to analyse your social networks? Have a question? Post in our new bisonR github, in the Discussions section. github.com/bison-team/b...

Despotism promotes cooperation through enhanced interdependencies in non-human primate societies https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.03.27.645840v1

🚨 Job opportunity 🚨 A 3-year post doc position is opening as part of my #APELANG project funded by the @agencerecherche.bsky.social It’s about multimodal combinatorial communication in wild #chimpanzees 🐵 Job ad here: maelleroux-research.weebly.com/apelang.html And here 👇🏻

New paper from Olivia O'Callaghan's PhD on ERC project FACEDIFF www.facediff.co.uk, macaque facial expression processing gets better with age and good maternal care, so more flex than previously thought? @jamiewhitehouse.bsky.social @erc.europa.eu @ntupsychology.bsky.social doi.org/10.1016/j.is...

Amazing postdoc opportunity on wild chimps with an amazing mentor!

looking for ECRs to join the ProcB preprint team! You'll gain editorial/review training by screening BioRxiv submissions for suitable work, and help broaden the journal’s content and author diversity more info in the thread below and via royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/preprints 🧪 #EcoECRcareer

Adaptive behavioural strategies to seasonal challenges by a semi-urban feral ungulate https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.03.12.642745v1

Adaptive behavioural strategies to seasonal challenges by a semi-urban feral ungulate https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.03.12.642745v1

I am excited to announce that @neeltjeboogert.bsky.social and I are co-editing a special collection in the journal Animal Cognition on "Cognition in the Wild". Submissions are due by June 15. We are excited to see the amazing work you have been doing! link.springer.com/collections/...

"We present MacaqueNet, a global community of researchers who developed the first database on affiliative and agonistic behaviour. This database facilitates comparative research into the eco-evolutionary drivers of animal behaviour" @DeMoorDelphine🌏

We have an exciting new position in our lab for a PhD on parrot tool use! See below

So exciting to see MacaqueNet out into the world! 🤩 Learn about our global community & database centralizing standardized affiliative & agonistic data from 61 populations across 14 macaque species: doi/10.1111/1365... Explore >600 networks & request data: macaquenet.github.io/database/

@asab.org has a new grants secretary - it's me! I've already been busy preparing boosted travel grants for the @behaviour2025.bsky.social conference in Kolkata, India. Next job is to revise grants in line with EDIA principles and better support for #ECRs. Apply here: www.asab.org/grant-overview