📢 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)?

For a teeny tiny moment, I thought @joefresna.bsky.social had a really successful tortellini side-gig going on Germany-wide in all the LIDL's. And then it all came crashing down once I looked again.

@joefresna.bsky.social hello hello. Glad to see more people I know here finally!

A wonderful team effort to characterize the actions of HSD17B2, a gene that helps some #ruff males to dial down their testosterone levels, got published @science.org (1/n)

Wooohooooo go Dr. James goo!!!! @chorlnev.bsky.social is he not on Bluesky?!?!

Is it only me, or is anyone else suddenly seeing a surge in raaandom follower accounts this week?

A neat, detailed and not too detailed intro into making a Python package. Definitely worth a read, esp. if you have your own niche little codebase that maaaay be of interest to someone out there.

We love the community love. check out our community-developed beginner-friendly #python packaging tutorials here. www.pyopensci.org/python-packa... #openscience #opensource

With minus temperatures this week I still struggle to understand the peculiarities of physics and chemistry that allow my car's wiper-fluid to freeze but keep the contents of an Apfelschorle bottle liquid. And yes I did check that the wiper fluid could handle -ve temps.

@ahanaaurora.bsky.social hello hello.

@soundresearch.bsky.social hello hello. Glad to see you here!

Day 3 of the German Bat Meeting. #TDFF2025

Day 2 of the German Bat Meeting 2025 #TDDD2025. Today starts with Lena de Framond (MPI-Biol Intelligence Seewiesen) on how frog-eating Trachops bats manage prey capture in the presence of noise playbacks.

Eva Mardus talking on cognitive abilities in echolocating bats. V cool results using training methods used to study young children on numerosity and object permanence.

At the German Bat Meeting (TDFF 2025). First attempts at skeeting a conference after a long time. #TDFF2025

Another day at the office.

Waiting for X to deliver my (back-then) Twitter archive so I can port over all of my posts & media content....let's see how long it takes!

Suddenly being hit with the fragility of all data. Trying to backup precious data from 2018, and seeing the backup only happens halfway through before the drive gives up. Oh, also, there's an occasional clicking sound .

@albertabats.bsky.social would love to be added to the starter pack 🙏🏽