I made a new thing :) New videos every Monday Thank you all students who I annoyed to make this happen 🤭

PhD Alert! 😍 Our lab is hiring a PhD student to study how shrews shrink in winter and grow in spring. Yes, you read that right! tinyurl.com/shrinkingshr... Join us at the @mpi-animalbehav.bsky.social, study a super cool animal, and join the @imprs-qbee.bsky.social community! DM me for questions!

Here is the final episode of Season 2 of our podcast In the Swarm! In this episode, we are joined by Dr Vivek Sridhar and Dr Hemal Naik as they tell us the tales of the visually spectacular mating phenomenon of lekking in Blackbucks. www.exc.uni-konstanz.de/collective-b...

Scientists discover the secret behind the shrew’s amazing ability to shrink their brains 🧠 The clever trick sheds unwanted weight without compromising too much on cognition. Find the 5-letter word 👇 Study by @cecibaldoni.bsky.social Dechmann Lab #shrewcrew et al www.ab.mpg.de/743885/news_...

New Episode! What is it like being inside an egg? Can you feel your sibling eggs nearby? How do you tell your parents when you are ready to come out? Dr Gabriella Gall is here to tell us all about her research into the world of egg communication. www.exc.uni-konstanz.de/collective-b...

MELA — a short documentary on the Mating Ecology of Lek Breeding Antelope — takes you behind the scenes of an interdisciplinary #UniKonstanz @cbehav.bsky.social @mpi-animalbehav.bsky.social research journey. This film reveals how science is done, shared, and lived: www.youtube.com/watch?v=5i4d...

Fascinating symposium on using AI to observe animal behavior! AI has the potential to accelerate progress in wild animal welfare science, too, as tools become available that can recognize and track behavior, vocalizations, physiological markers, and body condition. #Behaviour2025

📖Published📖 Price et al. present an open-source easy-to-use workflow, using zebras as an example, that can detect individuals in their natural environment and automatically infer their atomic scale behaviours of standing, grazing, walking and running 🦓 buff.ly/z4qyIyD

New episode of our podcast is out! In this episode, @yguenzel.bsky.social and Inga Petelski will tell us all about how shy, solitary locusts can transform into hungry, gregarious ones who are ready to march with millions to search for the next meal. www.exc.uni-konstanz.de/collective-b...

To study emotions in free-ranging #animals, researchers rely on what they see: but inferring #emotions from #behavior is not enough! Our new preprint discusses how #technology could help us better understand animal affect under naturalistic conditions: osf.io/preprints/os...

Check out the newest episode of our podcast "In the Swarm"! Have you ever wondered how tiny insects navigate the world? In this episode, @anna-stoeckl.bsky.social explains how the tiny but mighty insect brain controls behaviour of stunning complexity. www.exc.uni-konstanz.de/collective-b...

New paper out 🥳 The physiological costs of leadership in collective movements. - Trying to lead the group can be stressful, so it might not always be worth it!#openaccess at @currentbiology.bsky.social @cbehav.bsky.social @mpi-animalbehav.bsky.social

Second season is finally out!! Go check out the first episode with Liang on robot fish! Big shoutout to @krisanathema.fediscience.org.ap.brid.gy for leading us through the finish line ;) open.spotify.com/show/2c1iSav...

If there is an optimal behavior, why is there so much variation in the world? We found that, for white storks, context is everything. @anflack.bsky.social @mpi-animalbehav.bsky.social New paper! @cellpress.bsky.social doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2025.06.044 🧵1/5

New paper out in the lab on collective gaze following in pigeons in iScience! Coolest experimental design ever🤭

Shout out Janet for my favorite figure so far

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...

Behold the world’s first off the grid Mormon cricket virtual reality system! @mpi-animalbehav.bsky.social @uni-konstanz.de @sercansayin.bsky.social @1imurphy.bsky.social @vishwanathvarma @pvnkmrksk.bsky.social @icouzin.bsky.social

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

3D-SOCS now out in @methodsinecoevol.bsky.social!!! Fully raspi based synchronized camera system in the wild for 3D posture tracking 🤗 check out paper below! besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/8NM8BZ...

Back to see what the world of computer vision has to offer 😌

Move over, starling murmurations. There’s a slimier, squirmier collective behavior in town. It's a living, twisting tower of worms. Everybody, meet the wormuration 🪱🪱 Latest paper by Daniela Perez, Serena Ding and team @uni-konstanz.de Paper: doi.org/10.1016/j.cu... youtube.com/shorts/F8QVc...

Humans have many unusual traditions. But did you know animals’ strange behaviors can become culture too? Out now in Current Biology (doi.org/10.1016/j.cu...) we show the rise and spread of a surprising tradition: interspecies infant abduction. Interactive timeline (www.ab.mpg.de/671374) 🧵 (1/12)

🌍 We are launching a new #ManyLabs!!! Join the Heat & Cognition project! We're studying how extreme heat affects human thinking, social behavior & well-being — globally. Contribute & co-author: 🔗 Info: heatandmind.wordpress.com 📋 Sign up: www.soscisurvey.de/HeatandCogni... #EnvironmentalPsychology

A call to arms for eBirders and iNaturalists. 🚨 We want your bird photos! If you photograph feeding birds with flowers, fruit, seeds or prey, upload the image with locality details. We are data-harvesting species, size and type of food/prey to study foodwebs and species interactions. Thanks! 🧪🌐🪶

🦅🧠 Bird Cognition 🧠🦅 Anyone who studies or is just fascinated by how birds perceive, learn, remember and solve problems 🐦 Let's all meet in this cool new #starterpack 🤩 Let me know if you want to join in too 🦜🦤🦉🦆🐣🪺🪶🧪 🔗 go.bsky.app/V2K7HQM #Ornithology #Birds #AnimalBehaviour

🚨 Shrew paper alert! 🚨 Our latest study found that brain size changes stayed on track, but behavior? 🤔 Not so much❗ Captivity makes shrews hyperactive and less motivated to learn, hinting at chronic stress. 🐾 Curious? Full paper here: doi.org/10.1098/rsos... #Shrews @mpi-animalbehav.bsky.social

Excited to present the latest from the lab out today in Cell www.cell.com/cell/fulltex.... See Thread! 1/8

Wanna know about pigeons in a smart barn, which can track who and what they are looking at? Mathilde Delacoux can help you in her talk at #cultureconference2025 @cultconf.bsky.social

Here is a short story of how this project came to be, started all the way as an undergrad student in @imperiallifesci.bsky.social, looking at sparrow videos @jj255.bsky.social, to my master's project @willpearse.bsky.social to now as one of my PhD projects! @cbehav.bsky.social

Scientists use VR + lab + field study to rewrite the rules of locust swarming 🦗🦗 Latest @science.org from first author @sercansayin.bsky.social and #Konstanz team ⬇️ @einatcouzin.bsky.social @icouzin.bsky.social @cbehav.bsky.social @uni-konstanz.de www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

📖Published📖 Check out our recent research article, presenting YOLO-Behaviour, a flexible framework for identifying visually distinct behaviours from video recordings 🌎 🧪 👇 https://buff.ly/4gJxtsL

New paper from @joewoodman.bsky.social DPhil thesis now published. Here, Joe (& 30 friends) use @spibirds.bsky.social to collate data on age structure for 32 Great Tit populations spanning 67 years & involving 130 000 individual birds. Why did we do this? 1/n onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Social networks of birds are often constructed from spatio-temporal data streams of feeder visits, but how do we define ‘connection’ and does it matter? While common definitions yield similar patterns, do consider context of systems and research Qs! Well led by co-first authors Alex and Jamie! 🧵👇

Second paper out this week 😱😱 We present YOLO-Behaviour, a flexible, easy to implement, robust framework for automated behavioural annotation from videos, published in @methodsinecoevol.bsky.social!! [paper] doi.org/10.1111/2041... [documentation] alexhang212.github.io/YOLO_Behavio...

New paper out in BEAS! Co-first with @j-dunning.net : we compared three different ways of defining social associations from RFID data across four avian study systems. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Pls share: Konstanz School of Collective behavior from 21st July - 8th August. Application deadline: April, 15. An amazing line up of speakers spanning all aspects of collective behavior . For info: www.exc.uni-konstanz.de/kscb/ @cbehav.bsky.social @mpi-animalbehav.bsky.social

Decided to take on some social media management 🤔 Go give us a follow!!!

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...

Closeup of a long-tailed tit showing its typical yellow eye-shadow 🪶📷

lol at last line of caption: "This figure is not intended to suggest that science is a race." The treachery of images! (source doi.org/10.1371/jour...)

4, 3, 2, 1, ... Only a few more days left to apply to our PhD positions 🏁

Made my way back on Lundy after 3 years! 🌄 Time to stare at some sparrows @jj255.bsky.social

The AI for Conservation community on BlueSky is growing quick! Here's a starter pack of folks working in this area - please share and nominate more folks (yourself or others) to be added. And if you are on the list but wish to be removed, please let me know! #AI4E 🧪 go.bsky.app/UNUCejU

New publication out: Alex Chan reading us how to use machine learning to automatically extract behavioural data from videos of sparrows feeding their young! Read it here: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...