📘 The full ANTS 2026 Conference Guidebook is now available. It brings together the full conference programme, now including Late Breaking Results and Fresh Perspectives, as well as a selection of robot demos lined up. Explore the full guidebook here: ants2026.org/pdf/ANTS2026...

Def worth reading, while replacing examples w ones from your own field....."once you do control, you may end up with the conclusion that you can’t conclude anything. To be entirely clear, that would be the correct conclusion. It’s just not a fun one."

Writing a grant and putting DAGs out there for the first time in the analysis section. Anyone here ever tried this out? Wondering if it's too much - or also a bit concerned that it may backfire if reviewers think this is 'obvious' and not worthy of separate figure(s) for each analysis question😅.

Our second ICARUS system is in space 🚀🛰️ At 9am PT, a Falcon 9 rocket left Earth from California, taking an ICARUS payload with it. This is the beginning of ICARUS 2.0—independent, robust, real-time—with more ICARUS satellites to come. Read more▶️https://tinyurl.com/mw48c398 📸 Space X, EnduroSat

I would have preferred to have the "draw the rest of the owl" meme on the cover, but this will do. Seems like it is on schedule, and we'll leave some typos so you know we didn't write it with AI.

Two Masters thesis position openings up on the lab website: activesensingcollectives.com/openings Especially interesting perhaps if you're into acoustics, graphical design, realtime visualisations, and algorithms. Please do spread the word and forward in your circles.

Learning about DAGs and practicing figuring out the adjustment sets them are two different things. Found this neat Shiny app, Daggle, from the Daggitty website cbdrh.shinyapps.io/daggle - generates random graphs and let's you guess the minimal adjustment sets. Anyone with other suggestions here?

Statistical Rethinking 2026 is done: 20 new lectures emphasizing logical and critical statistical workflow, from basics of probability theory to causal inference to reliable computation to sensitivity. It's all free, made just for you. Lecture list and links: github.com/rmcelreath/s...

Job application rejection and grant award notification in the span of 30 mins today. And so it is - the dice will continue to be rolled 🤣😅

Another day at the office. View from the Mensa yesterday.

good morning everyone project your personal imposter syndrome onto this gif ur welcome

View from the office (strictly speaking on the way to the bus stop... :p)

...first time using an LLM to do translations. And whew am I glad I understand German. So many subtle hallucinations I would never have realised otherwise. Making up words ('Echolokationsfledermaus') & classic hallucination ('a bioinspired flight capable system'..instead of 'bioinspired system').

Okay, let's get the AI discussion entirely out of the hype-and-theory realm. For the "I'll just vibe code and trust the LLM folks," here's an interesting page showing results from asking several LLMs to perform a simple coding task (creating an HTML/CSS clock): [clocks.brianmoore.com/]. 1/6

Realised today that one of the packages I wrote during my postdoc (beamshapes, see QR code) has been used and cited to do some cool science. I'm feeling unusually happy about this, somehow even more than a paper citation. Shout-out to the @dfg.de + @cbehav.bsky.social for funding this work.

This is scarily true - professional + collegial attention- & esp. true for scientific software. I'm imagining a niche field - where there are anyway only 1-2 OSS package/s out there. Even lesser incentives to develop, test, document, if it'll all be spat out as code snippets 1/2

Thur can't be said enough 🤣 it's a choice that they're brushing past you, and very rarely an accident

“History shows us that the right to literacy came at a heavy cost…those oppressed recognized that literacy is liberation. To my students & to anyone who might listen, I say: Don’t surrender to AI your ability to read, write & think when others once risked their lives & died for the freedom to do so”

📢 ANTS 2026 deadline extended to 20 Nov 2025! No further extensions will be granted. If you haven’t submitted yet, there’s still time to share your latest work with the swarm intelligence community. We look forward to seeing your contributions!

Plenary by @natashamhatre.bsky.social - on her 'random biased walk in science" - featuring the coolest insect acoustics, tool-use by crickets, many cool FEM animations and hearing #IBAC25

Seeing advertisements by OpenAI I'm Bengaluru saying 'I want to give a public speech...teach me how'...with ChatGPT written in blazing letters below. Wow. what exactly does the company think an LLM can do...? #AIhype

And just like that, #Behaviour2025 is finished! Huge thanks to the organizers and everyone who made this happen!

Beautiful work by @ronjabigge.bsky.social and Rebecca Grittner is out 🥳 How do the statistics of natural visual scenes and the relevance of these stimuli for the moths' flight safety shape the integration of parallel pathways for flight guidance? ✈️🦋

Fieldwork - this time with the lab! Fieldwork in the campus @uni-konstanz.de by the lake with a view, and WiFi, what a luxury 😎 @albertodoimo.bsky.social @adityamoger.bsky.social

📢 2 PhD positions (E13 TV-L, 75%) in our DFG-funded project on great ape communication & the evolution of common ground! 🧠 Backgrounds in biology, psychology or linguistics welcome. 🗓️ Deadline: Aug 13 🔗 bit.ly/4l8p7hy & bit.ly/46jcfAq Please share! @elmanubohn.bsky.social @meanwhileina.bsky.social

"Part of our task in the face of generative AI is to make an argument for the value of thinking – laboured, painful, frustrating thinking." activehistory.ca/blog/2025/06...

Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines? Jevin West (@jevinwest.bsky.social) and I have spent the last eight months developing the course on large language models (LLMs) that we think every college freshman needs to take. thebullshitmachines.com

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...

Feels like the right kind of post to tag @laurieparrot.bsky.social and @luisana (why can't I tag you!)

Deadline for the advertised PhD position to study echolocating bat swarms in the wild with a multi-sensor rig ended this week Monday (25/5) (www.activesensingcollectives.com/openings/)! Big thanks and appreciate the interest of the 50+ people who sent in their applications!

Just some water-striders doing their very cool thing of walking on water.

One more month to the application deadline for a PhD position studying active sensing collectives in the wild with multiple sensors. Do you like this weird mix of animal behaviour, coding, and cool gadgets? Then check out the thread to see what our lab does and more on the position itself!!

Reading a paper that uses mics to record a cool animal sound, and then the sentence along the lines of .... 'gain was regulated continuously to improve signal-to-noise' ratio....sigh. If you already have a bad SNR, amping up the gain will only make everything 'bigger', but SNR doesn't change!

Handheld LiDAR scanners vs static high-res scanners.... anyone here with experience using either - would love to hear your thoughts. Please DM/reply to this post?!

Opened up Spyder (Python GUI) for the first time in 4 weeks or so - moment of realization: this group leader thing is no joke 🐥

Let me introduce our new lab homepage. www.spatial-navigation.com We are looking for PhD students and one Postdoc that can start in November 2025. Contact me if you are in to studying spatial memory of honeybees. @uni-wuerzburg.de @neuroethology.org

Hello World! After almost a month of starting a research group - finally the announcement :) We are the 'Active Sensing Collectives' group (tinyurl.com/yckehxys) at the CASCB in the University of Konstanz. We're still growing, see PhD position ad below. @cbehav.bsky.social @uni-konstanz.de z.de

Just got my copy a few days earlier than expected. 70 pages in. So many valid points and much re-thinking to be done (esp for my own work) - looking forward to going through the book more times even in the future @ambikamath.bsky.social !

🚀COSMOS is BACK!!!💫 The Computational School on Modeling Social and collective behavior (COSMOS) will take place in RIKEN, Tokyo, between 29 Sept - 3 Oct, organised by me and fantastic @thecharleywu.bsky.social ! Application deadline: 25th April. For more details see 👉️ cosmossummerschool.github.io

Waiting for my copy to arrive by post here in DE!

Down with the flu, masked and waiting at the hospital. What started as a whiny skeet has turned into an optimistic one over 20 mins as I see people who were mask-less going in masked to see the doctor, & those with a 'free-nose' covering it up. This is all without any obvious masking mandate! Yay.

A locust swarm descended upon collective behavior! Excited to share my postdoc work with @icouzin.bsky.social

Last call! Midnight tonight deadline to apply for a PhD with my group on serotine bat #ecology, helping develop rabies control strategy. Info here (nb. overseas fees waivers available & residency restrictions not relevant as project is field/desk not lab). www.sussex.ac.uk/study/fees-f... #bats

Quote-posting for reference as a soon-to-be group leader. Data management -- hmmm, definitely need more training here.

I feel like @kokkonut.bsky.social would appreciate this news - remembering her talk on senes ence at Etho 2025 a few days ago in Tutzing where Wisdom featured prominently as an example

Echoes with what I have been generally feeling. Esp point 10 struck a chord - fact-checking AI output could be more tedious than just doing it yourself. I always felt this about people using esp AI for coding.... and leaving the best point for the last - "you do not have to use generative AI" ;)

An extremely confusing use/declaration of AI (most prob an LLM. Reading the Aldi-Süd monthly catalog with the image of a cheesy pizza served next to a bowl of...what appears to be..more cheese? And the text below which says 'serving suggestion generated with AI'... Is this a flex, hand-washing...or?

@marlenfroehlich.bsky.social hello hello!

One of the many places that I think LLMs should be banned. To quote @ctrlalttim.bsky.social "We are supposed to be doing substantive, not performative work."

Have to check out the original paper - but I must say the electrostatic sense - something that's so underappreciated and another of those 'alien' sensory modalities we may never fully be able to intuit (maybe aside from when I get zapped by static every now and then)?