Human language is incredibly complex. But why do some primates have richer vocal repertoires than others? Open access paper in Primates: we ask what explains that variation and how lifespan, brains, groups, & conflict have shaped primate vocal communication. Open Access: rdcu.be/foZ5M 🐒🧪Thread 👇

one anecdote: I was searching for a link to one of my old papers on Google, and the automated Gemini summary attributed all of my lab's work to my husband

Our Anthropological Linguistics group at Uni Zurich has a webpage now: www.isle.uzh.ch/en/AnthroL.h...

When utilized in literature review, LLMs consistently 1. fail to mention female authors in female-led literatures, 2. insist that men are more influential or more heavily cited when this is contradicted by objective citation counts, and 3. attribute women’s work to hallucinated male scholars.

Trying to find the following book chapter by Nelson & Marler: does anyone have a copy? Nelson, D. A., & Marler, P. (1990). The perception of birdsong and an ecological concept of signal space. In W. C. Stebbins & M. A. Berkley (Eds.), Comparative perception, Vol. 2. Complex signals (pp. 443-478).

☺️Lovely write-up about our new #mongoose paper on how they pre-emptively change their behaviour in relation to the #intergroup threat level. Thank you. @josharbon.bsky.social @bristolbiosci.bsky.social @ukri.org Paper: doi.org/10.1038/s415... Article: scienceblog.com/wildscience/...

Coverage in the Guardian of our latest publication in Royal Society Open Science, with fantastic collaborators Alan McElligott (@amcell.bsky.social), Christian Nawroth (@goatswhostare.bsky.social), Federico Rossano and Simon Townsend. Paper threaded below! www.theguardian.com/science/2026...

Very happy to have finally published on my secret favourite animal (sorry chimps!)

'Among the universities that have done the most to offer non-traditional students the benefits of a higher education is London Metropolitan University. And I’m one of 120 academic staff who are being made redundant at the end of July: approximately 20 per cent of the teaching complement.' 1/3

In our new TREE paper, with M. Borgerhoff Mulder, S. Brosnan and E. Strauss we show that power in animal societies can be subject to control. When high-powered individuals use aggression to gain better access to resources, other group members can respond with "levelling". doi.org/10.1016/j.tr...

Do elephants adress one another with vocalizations that function like human personal names, as was widely reported two years ago? Dharmarajan (2026) argues that this finding may have been just a methodological artefact. 🐘🧪 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

I actually listened to the summary of @florencesn.bsky.social and mine's #chi2026 paper today and it is essentially 100% wrong in everything it says about the paper. I have to assume no-one at ACM used or tested this at any point. Good luck to anyone actually using these.

Interested in collaborating with our lab? Why not visit? Visitors have published chapters, got new ideas and made new collaborations. At @scienceanu.bsky.social we have much to offer, including joining for cool field work and seeing great wildlife. Details here: sites.google.com/site/drfarin...

Next Level is out in just five days! I've been going over the chapters on noise and Minecraft today, another example of the paired chapters in the book. Minecraft is probably the most iconic modern use of procedural generation, and an immensely cool generator. (Preorders: linktr.ee/next_level)

Next Level is out in less than a week! I wanted to do a few threads in the run-up to launch about some of the things I cover in the book. The core of the book is paired chapters that introduce techniques or ideas and then study games that used it, like grammars and Spelunky's level generation.

Good news! "your manuscript entitled "Domestic goats can follow the direction of human voices to solve a hidden-object task", accepted for publication, Royal Society Open Science @royalsocietypublishing.org led by @chimpsahoi.bsky.social preprint version: doi.org/10.64898/202...

PhD Opportunity! 4-year funded PhD @uniexecec.bsky.social: “From cognition to conservation: using cognitive and behavioural research to enhance animal reintroductions”. Closes: 5 June 2026. Funding: @royalsociety.org (UK/Home students only). More info & to apply: www.exeter.ac.uk/study/fundin... 1/

Very proud of my prior PhD student (now Dr.) Nikola Falk getting her first thesis chapter out into the wild! Nikola used playback experiments to examine the factors underlying heterospecific eavesdropping on alarm calls by meerkats and yellow mongooses: academic.oup.com/beheco/artic...

📢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

"The AI Grad Student": A Harvard professor describes working with Claude. Early on, he describes misconduct that would cause any student to be terminated: "It faked results, hoping I wouldn't notice." But he ends the essay with "Now I'm doing 100% of my research with LLMs". Am I losing my mind?

🚀 Postdoc Alert! Are you passionate about social learning & cultural evolution? @dominikdeffner.bsky.social & I have a 3-year position with freedom to develop your research and work on cutting-edge multiplayer and immersive experiments. Apply by March 30! hmc-lab.com/SocialLearni... Pls share 🙏

From Apr 1, 2026, I’ll launch my own lab at Tohoku University as an Assistant Professor! I’m happy to host applicants for the JSPS International Postdoc Fellowships. If you’re interested in mathematical models of human history, feel free to DM me!

🦎 Funded 4-year PhD position on Lizard Evolutionary Ecology in our lab at UCLouvain (Belgium)! Apply before 9 March! jobs.uclouvain.be/Personnelsci...

Clicking the "no response" option caused my brain to hard crash into system reboot, do not recommend

1. I’m quite happy with this popular piece that Lee Dugatkin and I wrote recently. For the next two weeks it’s free to read on the American Scientist website.

We’re hiring a Field Project Manager with the Moyen Bafing Chimpanzee Project! Help run a growing wild chimpanzee research & conservation project in West Africa 🐵 Apply by 24 Feb (open until filled). More info via QR code in the image. Note: Right to work in the EU required. #job #conservation

If anyone is wondering what to get me for christmas, I would mostly enjoy...4 citations. Nudge me over my 2020 peak! I'm so close to feeling alive again.

Admissions to the International Master of Bioacoustics for the 26-27 academic year are now open. Please spread the word! More info here 👇 www.masterofbioacoustics.com?lang=fr #bioacoustics

1/12 Consciousness and attention in honeybees This study provides evidence of consciousness-like states in bees, revealing strong and fascinating parallels with vertebrate awareness. I will try to explain it in a few "tweets". (paper) www.cell.com/iscience/ful... by @catherinemacri.bsky.social

Herding as an emergent behaviour in harem groups of feral Garrano ponies: doi.org/10.1098/rsif... #JRSocInterface #bioinformatics

The ACM Digital Library, where a LOT of computing-related research is published (I'd say at least 75% of my own publications), is now not only providing (without consent of the authors and without opt-in by readers) AI-generated summaries of papers, but they appear as the *default* over abstracts.

Iain Douglas-Hamilton was a champion for elephants 🐘 & one of the inspirations for my own research. He was among the 1st to study ele social behaviour & it was his life's work to protect them Sending my condolences to all the friends & family during this sad time www.bbc.com/news/article...

Fully funded #PhDposition in Comparative Cultural Psychology @mpi-eva-leipzig.bsky.social. We will use touchscreen experiments & eyetracking to study mental simulations in nonhuman apes & human children across different cultures. All info here: www.eva.mpg.de/career/posit... Please share / apply!🙏

Registrations are now open 📢 Want to join the conference and/or the workshop? Head to our website: culture-conference.com/registration/ As every year, attendance at the conference is free 🎉 (the workshop has a small fee). Reminder: Abstract submission closes soon—submit yours before Monday!

Big new blogpost! My guide to data visualization, which includes a very long table of contents, tons of charts, and more. --> Why data visualization matters and how to make charts more effective, clear, transparent, and sometimes, beautiful. www.scientificdiscovery.dev/p/salonis-gu...

I finally got around to reading this. You should read it too. "We are exporting the very labor of teaching and learning—the slow work of wrestling with ideas, the enduring of discomfort, doubt and confusion, the struggle of finding one’s own voice." www.currentaffairs.org/news/ai-is-d...

“When participants used ChatGPT to draft essays, brain scans revealed a 47% drop in neural connectivity across regions associated with memory, language, & critical reasoning. Their brains worked less, but they felt just as engaged—a kind of metacognitive mirage.”🧪

The Culture Conference is (once again) indulging in that grand old tradition of EXTENDING the submission deadline‼️ The new deadline for abstract submissions is December 15th. Registration will open very soon—stay tuned! culture-conference.com/abstract-sub...

Feel good movie of the year

Be nice if you could put like "Hi reviewers, we could go with Figure format A or B here. What do you reckon is best?" into your manuscript but noooo I have to be brave

After the Ngogo chimpanzee group killed 21 members of neighboring groups and expanded their territory by 22%, female birth rates more than doubled and infant survival increased sharply—showing clear fitness benefits from intergroup killing. In PNAS: https://ow.ly/TKmf50XuPjY

New Paper out in Proceedings of the Royal Society B! 🎉 Sequence organization of mother–infant interactions in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii) in the wild. See the thread below for a quick explanation, and check out the paper: royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

Harmony in the hive? Think again! 🐝⚔️ Insect societies are famous for cooperation, but beneath the surface lies a brutal conflict over who gets to wear the crown! Our new review in Biological Reviews explores the evolutionary battleground caused by such caste fate conflict. 🧵

Our New Paper is out in Nature Human Behaviour: 🚨 Culture is critical in driving orangutan diet development past individual potentials! 🦧 www.nature.com/articles/s41.... See 🧵

Relying on ChatGPT to teach you about a topic leaves you with shallower knowledge than Googling and reading about it, according to new research that compared what more than 10,000 people knew after using one method or the other. Shared by @gizmodo.com: buff.ly/yAAHtHq

No, they really haven't. Calling spectral peaks vowels is as inane as saying that because my washing up gloves are also yellow, they have the same nutritional content as a banana. Zero evidence of vowel-like function. It's pure clickbait, and a new low in irresponsible claims from this group 🙄🐳🦑🧪

Nice piece from @hollyasmith.bsky.social on this from @thecowbirdlab.bsky.social et al. in @natecoevo.nature.com 🐦 Did learned vocal signals evolve from innate? 🐦 Authors study this in 21 avian hosts of brood parasites www.nature.com/articles/s41... #prattle 💬 #bioacoustics 1/2

Female mountain gorillas in Bwindi live for years after their last birth, reshaping group life and stability. A study finds they may hold the evolutionary key to post-reproductive survival. #Primatology #BehavioralEcology #Gorillas #Evolution www.primatology.net/p/the-elder-...