Published @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social with @drewlinsley.bsky.social & @tonyfeng.bsky.social: As vision models scale to human/superhuman accuracy, they’re becoming worse models of primate vision—benchmark engineering isn’t neuroscience. @carneyinstitute.bsky.social @browncopsy.bsky.social

Threading the needle: Spatial constraints sharpen visual sensitivity in honeybees https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.01.02.696520v1

Modeling echolocation as an active pursuit of information via infotaxis https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2025.12.31.697206v1

We wish all of you a happy new year and we hope to see many of you at this year's ICN which will take place in Vancouver 🇨🇦 (icn2026vancouver.com). A perfect platform for people interested in Neuroethology and would like to connect with our society.

Delighted that our review on taste in butterflies and caterpillars still made it into the special collection of "Neuroethology in Lepidoptera" 🐛 🦋: lnkd.in/epXNNK_z This article, led by Dimitri Peftuloglu, gives a great overview of how these wonderful insects detect plant metabolites 🌱.

Do you love quantifying animal behavior as much as we do? We have just the tool for you! Presenting #OCTRON - a pipeline that helps you create rich annotation data and enables training of custom segmentation models. Have a look, particularly if you work with non-model / invertebrate organisms!

Energetic benefits of social information for movement in patchy landscapes https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2025.12.18.695131v1

Very proud of this new paper from the lab! Work by the magnificent Andrea Adden and many brilliant collaborators illuminate how moth and butterfly brains have evolved in light of different ecologies. Freely available here: rdcu.be/eVR3B; @lundvision.bsky.social @biologylu.bsky.social

Why motor learning involves multiple systems: an algorithmic perspective https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2025.12.19.695526v1

Absolutely love being in Scotland but it seems I get the flu every time I step foot up here 🥲

Ever wanted to know how the visual system of a long distance migratory moth looks like? Then you'll find your answers in our new paper. Finally out, after about a decade of collecting data by a group af amazing co-authors. Find it here, open access: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

How do biological agents learn for the future? Our perspective piece on the value of prospective learning in neuroscience is finally out. This is part of a long running collaboration with @kordinglab.bsky.social & Josh Vogelstein (as well as many other people) www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Excited to share our new work on visual information processing in the retinocollicular pathway. We discovered that while luminance responses can predict motion responses in retinal ganglion cells, this prediction does not hold in the superior colliculus cells. www.cell.com/current-biol...

Hawkmoths need to move to gauge distance … calculating “tortuous trajectories” is a real task 🦋💐 #ASABWinter2025

Note that there’s a PhD position on this topic, if you found this interesting! #ASABWinter2025

*First preprint from our lab* !!!!! How does the brain learn to anchor its internal sense of direction to the outside world? 🧭 led by Mark Plitt @markplitt.bsky.social & Dan Turner-Evans, w/ Vivek Jayaraman: “Octopamine instructs head direction plasticity” www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Thread ⬇️

Attending #ASABWinter2025 this coming week? Feel free to stop by my poster and check out how we used novel visual field estimations for freely-flying hawkmoths to investigate lateralized sensorimotor control! Excited to share the results from the past two years of work 🦋👁️👅🦾 and happy to chat!

Just TWO DAYS until the application deadline for our funded PhD disentangling the impacts of light pollution on spider eyes and visual ecology! 👀🕷️🌃 The project will combine development, morphology, behaviour, and genetics, and can be shaped by the student👩🏽‍🔬 Interested? Apply! Questions? Message me!

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🐺 My First Paper Is Out! 🐺 This study called ‘Wolves on Ice’, based on my MSc thesis, is now published in Animal Behaviour. @asab.org Together with the Scandinavian Wolf Research Project, we studied #wolf habitat selection of water bodies during winter in Norway and Sweden. A short thread 1/4

We discuss various strategies for locating nests of the rare and endangered above-ground nesting bumblebee species Bombus muscorum. Although we did not find any nests, we were able to track bees marked with paper strips for up to 800 m. @jki-research.bsky.social @nabu.de doi.org/10.1111/icad...

The curious case of the comb jelly, where we described a comb jelly with the ability to reverse its development to an earlier stage of life, is now also available at #spotify 🤩 #ctenophores 🪼⏪ open.spotify.com/episode/6c2O... with @joanjsoto.bsky.social @msarscentre.bsky.social

Completely agree. And if I can make a self-promoting plug here, we have a nice table in this paper trying to separate some of these ideas out. The brain is very information-efficient (bits/ATP), while still being very expensive in energy consumption (ATP/sec). www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Soapbox time: the problem with metabolic efficiency arguments in neuroscience is that they often confuse energy efficiency with energy expenditure. Biological systems are optimized for energy efficiency, but that does NOT imply they are optimized for low energy expenditure 🧵 1/

Have you ever wondered what you would find if you could keep your eyes on a bee for more than a few meters? Us, too! preprint (with videos!) + thread 🧵 Precise, individualized foraging flights in honey #bees 🐝 revealed by multicopter drone-based tracking www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 1/9

Siphonophores are champions of community collaboration. 🤝🏆 This isn't one animal. It's actually a colony of individual animals called zooids. Each has a specialized role. From the orb-like swimming nectophores to the bright orange stinging tentacles, they're essential to the survival of all.

(1/n) We are excited to share our new paper in Nature Communications, by Hagar Lavian (@hlavian.bsky.social) and team, revealing how the zebrafish brain integrates visual navigation signals! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New paper: Stick dexterity in carrion crows🥢 Commentary on Moll et al. 2025 in which they trained crows to use stick tools. Their neat set-up allowed tracking tool motions, showing that crows became more efficient over time. Could nest building affect their stick dexterity? Full text: rdcu.be/eSOMF

Influencer in flies: Socially interactive individuals shape group-level characteristics https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.11.28.691157v1

Textbook neurons are usually spiking. However, there exist plenty of non-spiking neurons whose information transmission is less understood. Shirahata et al. studied Ca-dynamics of non-spiking mechanosensory neurons in crickets that are sensitive to air flow. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

This is an extremely interesting article about the collapse of early farming societies across Europe around ~5000 BC. We like to think of prehistoric times as being largely peaceful, but it seems early civilisations weren't immune to ritualistic violence & cultural collapse.

Fish alter locomotor and feeding kinematics to capture aerial prey #ProcB #OpenAccess #Biomechanics royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

We had a new paper out yesterday in @royalsocietypublishing.org Biology Letters. About how the cranial feathers of male Golden and Lady Amherst’s Pheasants affect their visual fields. Nice to see it picked up The New York Times and Science. Paper link below.

🚨Friends, we’re happy to share that our book is available for pre-order! 🎉 We aimed to cover all the foundations of the topic in an accessible manner for a large audience. It could help set up a bachelor-level curriculum on the topic. Pre-orders are very key for the fate of books: shorturl.at/Dxbif

Wondering if insects feel pain? Here's our critique of work that looked at this in bees. We were unconvinced of the evidence, and built a model to think through these issues. Their response is published alongside and we'll have a response to that out soon. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Weakly electric fish aim to stay inside moving refuges. Tracking the refuge motion is based on multimodal cues (vision, electro-, mechanosensation). A new behavioral study @jexpbiol.bsky.social tested how ambient currents affect this refuge tracking. journals.biologists.com/jeb/article/...

"Science Communication for Scientists" is a new textbook for scientists and experts at all career stages to learn how to communicate more effectively. We are proud to sponsor this book, which is available open-access here: bit.ly/46KSzFD

How do insects use vision to interact with flowers? IMPRS-QBEE student @lochlanw.bsky.social, working with @anna-stoeckl.bsky.social tells us more about his work on hummingbird hawkmoths and how they interact with flower patterns @mpi-animalbehav.bsky.social youtube.com/shorts/juEhw...

Come and work with us in our new home @bristolbiosci.bsky.social ! This fully funded PhD opportunity is open to anyone interested in spiders/eyes/light pollution/evolution/development! 🕷️👀 ⏰Deadline 15th December, online info event TODAY @2pm! Link in the PhD advert👉 www.findaphd.com/phds/project...

Jumping spiders can recognise one another. This ability to learn, remember and represent images is quite surprising for such a tiny-brained animal! buff.ly/dCkwPr0

Spiders that experience vibrations, visual stimuli, both or none during development do not differ strongly in the size of their brain areas. This is a surprising finding. Even more surprising is that siblings react alike. See our new publication in the J. comp. Neurology. doi.org/10.1002/cne.... 🧪🕷

Great opportunity to work with an incredibly cool person on an even cooler animal system!!

🚨Good news, everyone! 1) I'm thrilled to be joining the behavior powerhouse that is Indiana University!! So stoked, starting Jan 2026. 2) I'm recruiting grad students! Are you (or your trainee) interested in sensory ecology? behavior? evolution? fieldwork? spiders? Drop me a line Jstafstr(at)iu.edu

It's out, Minos transgenesis in the pantry moth by @donyaniyaz.bsky.social @lucalivraghi.bsky.social High efficient, glowing eye and silk gland markers peerj.com/articles/202... @peerj.bsky.social

In insects, motion processing is affected by background motion in Target Selective Descending neurons but not in presynaptic Small Target Motion Detectors. To explain this change, @puh23.bsky.social et al. examined three candidate TSDN circuit models. journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

Do you work (/want to work) with caterpillars? Or sensory systems? Or BOTH?! Well good golly do we have the paper for you! We explain the senses that caterpillars have, what they use them for, and how anthropogenic sensory pollution might be messing it all up 🐛 doi.org/10.1007/s003...

🐛📢🐛New paper alert! Lovely review of caterpillar sensory ecology led by @samjakeengland.bsky.social (@humboldt-foundation.de fellow) with friends and colleagues @rochellemeah.bsky.social @benitoexplains.bsky.social and Callum McLellan! 🐛⚡🐛👁️🐛🤝🐛👃🐛 link.springer.com/article/10.1...

#PhD position! Comparing #foraging and #cognition in #hummingbirds and #bumblebees Fieldwork in the Canadian Rockies, lab experiments at @newcastleuni.bsky.social, and ecological modelling at @uniofstandrews.bsky.social Details (including my email) here: iapetus.ac.uk/studentships...

Granger et al. Multispecies sensory networks and social foraging strategies: Implications for population decline in procellariiform seabirds www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... #ornithology #seabirds

How do animals recognise incoming stimuli as predators? In this paper from the Casas' lab, they tested aerodynamical looming, and they show that size and velocity of the incoming object activated wind-sensitive neurons in 🦗. These responses are similar to visual looming! www.cell.com/current-biol...