It's always a joy seeing your study organisms in their natural habitat. Cyrtophora citricola, facultatively group living spiders, near Càdiz, southern Spain 🕷️🕸️💕

"You're either crooked or you're stupid" 🫪

Read this whole piece.

ICE just reported the 19th death in immigration detention. Staff at Winn Correctional Center in Louisiana found 43-year-old Mamuka Artmeladze unresponsive the night of June 4. He died less than an hour later.

"There's no democracy without journalism." Scott Pelley is the best of us. www.nytimes.com/2026/06/07/m...

Happy World Ocean Day! The ocean is the heart of our life support system, without which we’d all be dead. It’s taken up >90% of the heat from global warming and 30% of our CO₂ emissions. In return, we give it 11 million tonnes of plastic annually, which animals ingest and also become entangled in.

"rewilded by horse, the reconstructed ‘aurochs’, wisent and water buffalo" - Horses were particularly associated with promoting Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths) that develop on small forbs.

📄New Paper!📄 Multimodal courtship in Nursery web spiders involves a nuptial gift AND vibrations. Do males adjust their investment in the vibratory signal based on how nice their nuptial gift is? Out now in @behavecol.bsky.social academic.oup.com/beheco/artic...

Chance to join the incredible banded mongoose project! 🇺🇬❤️ 3 year postdoc on the mongoose project, working on the evolution and maintenance of group identity in animal societies. The closing date for applications is 16 June 2026. www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DRN272/p...

🐒 PhD Opportunity 🐒 I'm excited to announce that we are now welcoming applications for a 3-year fully funded PhD position at Nottingham Trent University as part of our @leverhulme.ac.uk funded project. More info: jamiewhitehouse.github.io/mappingconne... Apply here: tinyurl.com/PhDNTU

Well, they've finally struck home. #ICE has detained my former #umich student, Yousif Azizi, a PhD student in public policy at Virginia Tech w/a valid visa. He was arrested while taking his children to school in Maryland. After multiple transfers, he is in a detention center in Arizona.

📢Fully-funded #PhD opportunity with us: 🐦 Quantifying (social) learning and social behaviour in an urbanised world 🐦 Position at @ceec-research.bsky.social 📆29th May deadline More info: tinyurl.com/yz28s96x Apply: tinyurl.com/2wpkb64y #cognition #socialbehaviour #fieldwork #birds 🙏Please Share

France passed a law requiring solar panels on every parking lot with more than 80 spaces. Equals 10 nuclear reactors Reduces heat island, shades cars The US -- 800 million parking spaces. Most of them are uncovered asphalt sitting in direct sunlight. Why aren't we doing this?

April 14th 2026, Stotra Chakrabarti, Natalia Borrego & Genevieve Finerty Title: Beyond Model Systems: Addressing ecological and systemic biases in behavioural research Drawing on research across multiple lion populations. Zoom urosario.zoom.us/j/83474018920

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This is a multigenerational sin that isn’t really reparable

Interested in automating lab experiments or tasks with camera-trackable animals? We (@vivekhsridhar.bsky.social, @domroche.bsky.social, @iplanass.bsky.social) are launching TracktorLive, a real-time #python package for tracking and response. Video below by @iplanass.bsky.social [1/4]

"Fans face intrusive surveillance, with proposals to force visitors to make their social media accounts available for vetting, and screening for "anti-Americanism"

Becoming a parent is much more detrimental to women’s academic careers than it is to men’s Read the full story: go.nature.com/4v4rxmQ

AI fuelled delusions - seriously scary www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle... @mhfaengland.bsky.social

Wildlife traffickers selling protected animals on Facebook use coded language to evade moderation. Research by Bellingcat and @mongabay.com has identified nine groups, with more than 70,000 members combined, leading back to six profiles and one broker in Indonesia. www.bellingcat.com/news/2026/03...

With just over a month to go until #CityNatureChallenge 2026, great to see evidence that it does actually help! We are entering Exeter for the first time so anyone who would like to help with either species recording over the weekend or IDs across the following 2 weeks would be much appreciated! 🎉

The SUSTAIN scheme is still open for applications until 8 April. This programme supports women in research to develop leadership and career potential, and is open to award-holders from eligible Royal Society, @raeng.org.uk and @acmedsci.bsky.social schemes. https://royalsociety.org/grants/sustain/

Meanwhile, senior management teams are hellbent on asserting (not testing, asserting) the overwhelming virtues of generative AI for students and “the student experience”. If we vacate this dispute without pragmatic pedagogic and ethical research, universities are sunk.

As an academic writing coach, here are the 7 mistakes I see supervisors and PIs make in the process of co-writing a paper with their PhD students or mentees. A thread. 🧵 #AcWri #PhDchat #Academia

Reminder that the abstract and travel grant deadlines for #ASABSpring2026 are due in less than 2 weeks! This is an especially fantastic conference for students and ECRs 🌼 Hope you can join us in beautiful Bristol asab-spring-conference2026.github.io

Some perspective: The S&P opened down -1.3% on Trump's Greenland saber-rattling. That's $750 billion of wealth destroyed -- roughly equal to estimates of the value of Greenland. And so ~in dollar terms~ his shenanigans have already cost the US one Greenland, and we've got nothing to show for it.

PhD position in fish ecology at the university of Gothenburg @naturvetenskap.bsky.social with fieldwork at Kristineberg marine station @kristinebergcenter.bsky.social Apply here: web103.reachmee.com/ext/I005/103...

I wrote about my experiences being sexually exploited as a child, and what we need to do to make sure AI doesn’t make that a reality for millions of children. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Being faculty in the US in 2026 means your meetings with students about their grad school apps also includes checking in to make sure none of their family has been kidnapped by ICE and wtaf is this world we've made

Please help spread the word on this, especially to those who may be feeling cold winds towards their research. We’ve opened the call for our International Fellowships, enabling early career researchers to work for two years at a UK research institution www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/funding/sche...

Why does Denmark recommend so few childhood vaccines? A Danish scientist explains | Science | AAAS share.google/dXIUYSK9lzUb...

Great to see this work presented at the #ASABWinter2025 meeting!! 💚🐾 If you want to know more, check out our paper that was recently published! www.sciencedirect.com:5037/science/arti...

Excited to launch the new improved Reproducible Code guide from @britishecologicalsociety.org @methodsinecoevol.bsky.social FREE online here! www.britishecologicalsociety.org//wp-content/... Amazing work by some very talented ECRs. We hope it’s useful!

Sad to be missing the #ASABWinter2025 @asab-meetings.bsky.social conference this week, but two postdocs that may interest ASAB members:

There is still time to submit your abstract and apply for a travel award! @behavecol.bsky.social @isbe2026.bsky.social

Holy CRAP. Retired engineer takes random pics of *kids*, without consent or attribution, bins them into “autistic” or “not autistic”, and uploads that “data” for free on Kaggle. Well over a HUNDRED papers are published, 38 in Springer Nature, 25 in IEEE, using it. And no reviewers objected? WTF.🧪

Interested in doing a PhD in biodiversity predictions 📈🐦🌸🪲📈? The Ciaxa Foundation has launched a call for PhD fellowships in 🇪🇸 Excellence Research Centers. @ebdonana.bsky.social is one of them: lacaixafoundation.org/en/doctoral-... 🧪🌎

⏰ 1 month left to apply for these fully-funded #PhD opportunities with us investigating social monitoring & manipulation. #bioacoustics #mammals UK-domiciled black-heritage scheme: tinyurl.com/aja54nr6 NERC DLTP: tinyurl.com/4jfy47pp DM or email me if you have questions. Please spread the word. ☺️

Are you a UK national/resident and identify as Black, Asian, or a minoritised ethnic community? You can apply for a PhD with me and colleagues at Swansea as part of our NERC CROCUS doctoral training programme... and we develop the topic together. Please get in touch if eligible and interested!

🕷️🌍🕸️ Spiders aren't creepy crawlies—they're ecosystem heroes! From pest control to biotech inspiration to key figures in our collective culture, a new review reveals the many services spiders provide: 🔗 doi.org/10.1111/brv.... (drawing by @jmalumbresolarte.bsky.social)

🕷️🕸️ New Reference genome available: Leviellus thorelli, a orb-weaving spider - a key resource for comparative studies of the #genomic basis of orb web and silk #evolution. 🔗https://open-research-europe.ec.europa.eu/articles/5-365 #Spider #genomics #genomes for #biodiversity @cnag-eu.bsky.social

An all-too-common interaction I've had: Scientist: Our research can help shape policy to protect this endangered animal. Me: Neat! How? What policy? What is it now, and what should it be instead? Scientist: Uhhhhh..... Our new paper can help! www.southernfriedscience.com/shark-scient... 🧪🦑🌍🦈

🚨 PhD position 🚨

🚨Two funded PhDs on the evolutionary ecology of antipredator colouration 🦋 with myself and Iliana Medina. One in Swansea tinyurl.com/4thtbph6 deadline Jan 12th @crocus-dla.bsky.social The other in Melbourne - deadline Jan 1st Please share among potential students!

First PhD position is on the evolutionary basis of empathy using infrared thermography in Barbary macaques at Affenberg Salem, southern Germany 👉 tinyurl.com/2e8wzkfz ⏰ deadline 20 Dec 2025

second PhD position is on social and ecological cognition in wild Assamese macaques at our long-term field site in the beautiful Phu Khieo Wildlife Sanctuary, Thailand 👉 tinyurl.com/ypefnbxp ⏰ deadline 20 Dec 2025

and finally, we offer a field assistant opportunity at our Assamese Macaque Project at Phu Khieo WS in Thailand 👉 tinyurl.com/5n77797r ⏰ deadline 18 Dec 2025