Leipzig U and the MPI for Evolutionary Anthropology (MPI-EVA) have an open faculty position (W2) in evolutionary population genetics! This position is tenured and comes with generous core funding. We are eager to welcome a new colleague! Deadline March 11. www.uni-leipzig.de/en/newsdetai...

"Two charismatic marsupial species that had been thought extinct for 6,000 years are alive in rainforest in remote West Papua." Oh yeah this is super cool as both the pygmy long-fingered possum and ring-tailed glider were previously only known from fossils 🤯🧪🐀 www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Anyone who is an expert in #gutmicrobiome research is interested in collaborating with us to study #free-rangingdogs in India? Please get in touch!

How and why does cognition vary so greatly between individuals and species? In @natrevbiodiv.nature.com, we propose the "Predatory Intelligence Hypothesis" which posits that the cognitive challenges associated with predator–prey interactions drive a cognitive co-evolutionary arms race rdcu.be/e5KIj

🚨JOB alert🚨 We have three (yes, THREE) 🌟lectureships🌟 advertised in the School of Biological Sciences, University of Bristol. Broad remit, including #AnimalBehaviour & #GlobalChangeBiology ⏱️Deadline: 8th March 2026 🙏Please circulate widely 😊Come join us! Full #job details: tinyurl.com/y3us95rc

🎉 What a way to end the year! Very excited to see our new paper on 🐭 innovation and mate choice out in @currentbiology.bsky.social! doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2025.11.077 With the amazing @fragdarm.bsky.social, @valmazza.bsky.social & Anja Guenther

I learned a lot from this paper, showing that for most microbes, humans host only one strain in their gut. This implies that we can track strains and their transmission between hosts. I'm wondering if it varies among host species. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🎉🍾 very excited to see this out before 2025 ends doi.org/10.1111/2041... with Will Hoppitt in @methodsinecoevol.bsky.social. This paper is an overview of our new R package STbayes, a user-friendly toolkit for performing Bayesian NBDA analyses. @cbehav.bsky.social @mpi-animalbehav.bsky.social

Our newest research in @currentbiology.bsky.social: www.cell.com/current-biol... We find dominant baboons have more interrupted and less rest at night. Author list and story in comments below :-)

Interested in how life history may shape the gut microbiome of a wild mammal? Keen on getting to work with an iconic long-term study system in Scotland? Check out this PhD opportunity with me, Josephine Pemberton and @gfalbery.bsky.social Reach out to chat more! 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

I wrote a little bit about the "missing heritability" question and several recent studies that have brought it to a close. A short 🧵

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

📢Two fully-funded #PhD opportunities to work with us: Topic: Social monitoring & manipulation UK-domiciled black-heritage scheme: tinyurl.com/aja54nr6 NERC DLTP: tinyurl.com/4jfy47pp Cosupervisors: #PatrickKennedy @ljnbrent.bsky.social @bristolbiosci.bsky.social #bioacoustics #mammals #fieldwork

New paper! We propose a framework to empirically study animal social relationships by modelling social network (SN) data as time-series—that is, without the need to aggregate them over time. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

🚨STOP SCROLLING, IT’S AN EMERGENCY BROADCAST📣 This message will self-destruct in 10…9…8…7…⏰ …now that I have your attention: 🧪Our new paper on Alerting Components in animal vocalization is out in AnimBehav🎉 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... #AnimalBehaviour #Bioacoustics #Communication

‼️ Thrilled to share my first article on the Kalahari meerkats ‼️, in @animalecology.bsky.social! Group membership strongly influences gut microbiomes & especially the co-occurrence of beneficial bacteria, beyond animals' age or sex, disease status, or environmental exposure doi.org/10.1111/1365...

New paper, led by Vlad Demartsev: Alerting components in animal vocalization www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

I am looking for a postdoc to work in our long-term system of food-caching mountain chickadees in the Sierra Nevada mountains. The expected start is April 2026. Please see details here: chickadeecognition.com/positions If interested and qualified, please contact me directly (email on the website).

Exciting new work from former team members Eric Romero, Cwyn Solvi, Fei Peng and colleagues makes the cover of Science: affective contagion in bumblebees! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Excited to share our new paper on the #social #structure of Rwenzori #colobus multi-male, multi-female core units! We found 3 different patterns but close #male #relationships in all that were long lasting! Paper is behind a paywall but contact us if you want a pdf. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

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

In 2018, Charles Murray challenged me to a bet: "We will understand IQ genetically—I think most of the picture will have been filled in by 2025—there will still be blanks—but we’ll know basically what’s going on." It's now 2025, and I claim a win. I write about it in The Atlantic.

Trying to work from home with my kids around

New paper, led by Luciano Atzeni: Using spatially explicit individual-based modelling to evaluate the ecological feasibility of big cat reintroduction: the example of the Arabian leopard www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

War is over, so here's a great fellowship to do a postdoc in Israel. Get in touch if interested: azrielifoundation.org/azrieli-fell...

⭐PhD position available!⭐ Come join us @imprs-qbee.bsky.social to study communication and collective behavior in animal groups! We're looking for someone excited to use computational approaches to tackle biological questions, using our full-group tracking datasets imprs-qbee.mpg.de/121465/analy...

I'm v excited to be recruiting a PhD student to work on badger behaviour and ecology! Starting date is March 2026; see the ad here, or message me for more details: www.gregalbery.me/s/March-2026...

Amazing days at the Sinharaja rainforest, Sri Lanka, and saw a loris!

This is an awe-inspiring and fascinating study that I thoroughly enjoyed reading. However, the overall framing in terms of "innate versus learned” is unnecessary. The innate versus acquired dichotomy is outdated and has been for a long time. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🌍🦋 Across 6 continents, 21 sites & 15,000 paper moths, we joined a worldwide experiment led by @wlallen.bsky.social & Iliana Medina, showing how ecological context shapes the evolution of animal colouration. Proud to be part of this global team effort: doi.org/10.1126/scie...

New preprint out from the lab, including @rroyaute.bsky.social: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... In this we test what we refer to as the "standard model" of behavioral variation. This was inspired by recent work identifying intra-genotypic variation as a major contributor to "individuality". 1/

New paper, led by Camille Bordes: Social network dynamics under experimental manipulations of predation risk and food abundance in wild rock hyraxes besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

New paper, led by Camille Bordes: Social network dynamics under experimental manipulations of predation risk and food abundance in wild rock hyraxes

Crazy discovery in ants 🤯🐜 One mother for two species via obligate cross-species cloning in ants | Nature www.nature.com/articles/s41... "Males from the same mother exhibit distinct genomes and morphologies, as they belong to species that diverged over 5 million years ago."

A 40C degrees day is perfect for checking some trail cameras in the Judean Desert with @otter-guy.bsky.social

🐒🕸️ New preprint! Confused about how to model animal social networks? ASNA can be confusing—but also full of opportunity. We break down 5 common misunderstandings in animal social network analysis and share solutions from behavioural ecology, anthro, stats, & network science. Hope it helps! A 🧵

We have a new paper out in @cp-iscience.bsky.social reporting that more socially integrated female chimpanzees have lower offspring mortality 🧪 #evosky #primates #primatology #anthropology www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

New in #ProcB - Early-life paternal relationships predict adult female survival in wild baboons - find out more about the study from the authors #Behaviour @archielab.bsky.social‬ royalsociety.org/blog/2025/06...

been a long time coming, there's now a preprint along with Will Hoppitt describing our new R package for creating, fitting and interpreting bayesian NBDA models (STBayes). www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1.... Documentation is here michaelchimento.github.io/STbayes/inde...

New paper in @behavecol.bsky.social (link: academic.oup.com/beheco/advan...) led by PhD student @marcofele.bsky.social using hard-won data from our amazing baboon team. Our @swanseauni.bsky.social press release: www.swansea.ac.uk/press-office... We introduce the idea of a "social spandrel".....

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)

1/3 Chimpanzees combine their vocalizations to create new meanings. They have studied more than 4000 sequences of 53 chimpanzees from Taï (Côte d'Ivoire), and analyzed how combinations (16) of two vocalizations change their function. (paper) www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Our latest superb starling work in @nature.com. We observe long-term reciprocal helping relationships, and suggest reciprocity is an underappreciated mechanism promoting the stability of cooperatively breeding societies. Led by Alexis Earl and @gerrycarter.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

If you're a grad student or an undergrad interested in research I need to you listen to me very carefully. You cannot learn to write good research papers if you do not read good research papers. Stop asking LLMs to summarize papers for you.

Really excited that our DFG grant on the Speciation Genomics of Eye Size variation in *Heliconius* has been funded :) In the next weeks, I will post an advert for a PhD, but if you know of good students, please suggest they get in touch. Please repost.

I wrote about how population stratification in genetic analyses led to a decade of false findings and almost certainly continues to bias emerging results. But we are starting to have statistical tools to sniff it out. A 🧵:

1/35 New paper out! @jamesTstroud and I dive into why long-term studies are crucial for understanding evolution. They reveal processes impossible to detect in short timescales and capture rare events that transform our understanding of evolutionary dynamics. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Postdoc fellowships in Israel: azrielifoundation.org/fellows/inte...

Friends! The science that we love is under threat. World-wide, there're forces seeking to make it corporate-like, focused on deliverables, or even the enemy of society. Take a stand & celebrate science & music! #theconferencetoendallconferences - Registration starts NOW! woodstock.img.cas.cz