Special issue editors @anna-stoeckl.bsky.social, Basil el Jundi & Kentaro Arikawa introduce their special issue on the neuroethology of lepidoptera 🦋. The issue covers a broad field of research spanning from neuroanatomy, sensory perception to behavior. link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Here’s a great PhD opportunity in the crossover between humanities and natural history- please repost 🙏 www.ccc.cam.ac.uk/initiatives/...
Ending of an era!
A close-up photograph of an ant (Cataglyphis velox) holding a bit of cookie, attached on a trackball device (spherical tradmill)
We usually assume 🐜 ants 🐜 learn views when facing their goal, but our data shows that it is not necessarily the case!
We combined field experiments with a biologically constrained model to show how a two-stage neural circuit (MB -> CX) could allow this:
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Last year, J. Endler published an inspiring essay in @behavecol.bsky.social on what we should be doing as behavioral ecologists 👉 doi.org/10.1093/beheco/araf029. According to him, "we need to put Ecology back into Behavioural Ecology: we need to make a lot more use of Natural History" (1/5)
Awesome stuff, congrats!
Even more excited — our paper is featured on the cover of Science Advances!
Huge thanks to @alexandrejan.bsky.social who took this incredible photo of a ctenophore (aka comb jelly) and the editors.
Here’s the cover 👇
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Wow this looks super good and impressive work, looking forward to reading properly. Congrats!
Big effort, exciting results - our paper on the constraints of thermal limits in tropical insects is now out in @nature.com! 🦋🐝🪰🪲🦗
@ecoresearchzoo3.bsky.social
@biologie-uniwue.bsky.social
@uni-wuerzburg.de
The Conservatives are, after all, well placed to know a lot about this morass, since they introduced it. In 2012, the coalition government launched the Plan 2 system of student loans and raised university fees across Britain to £9,000 per annum. To put Plan 2 in simple terms, loan repayments were laid out via a seemingly innocuous series of calculations. The first to consider is the threshold at which repayments begin. If you left education with, say, £27,000 worth of debt, you would only start paying it back once you met a predetermined salary. On its face, this might not seem like a particularly onerous demand. “Low-earning” graduates would avoid being saddled with repayments before they were financially able to begin making them, while their “high earning” peers could start chipping away at their debt, and provide an income stream for the state.
As any of my fellow literature or history graduates will tell you, however, the devil is in the details. For one thing, the threshold at which someone becomes a high earner was never particularly high and, following years of inflation, is now preposterously low. Rachel Reeves’ announcement that the government are freezing the threshold at April 2026 levels (£29,385) for a further three years only makes this worse. The real living wage for London is currently calculated at £28,860, which means that any London-based graduate making just £40 more per month than the minimum needed to live there will automatically begin paying their debt. In real terms, this means practically any graduate in any form of full-time work will be paying as much as 9 per cent of their income to the state, and for a very, very long time. Worse still, the amount owed by those graduates below the threshold does not remain static – it accrues interest, year on year, whether you’re working for low wages, volunteering, taking a career break or on maternity leave, ensuring that if you do pass the threshold some time later, you will be returning to find your original £27,000 much enlarged.
If the state’s attitude to what constitutes “high earnings” makes you think it’s oblivious to the concept of inflation, let me put your mind at ease. When it comes to the calculation of student loan interest, they are very conscious of inflation indeed. Each year, the interest charged on student loans is calculated by two components. The first is the Retail Price Index (RPI), which generally records a higher number than the Consumer Price Index (CPI). Governments prefer the latter, lower figure for many of their other calculations, just not when it comes to adding extra debt to every graduate in the country. To this is added a second component, a percentage tied to each graduate’s earnings, meaning that as your salary increases so too does the interest you’re paying on the loan you took out. If you think this seems like a predatory and punitive way to bilk students for as much money, and over as long a period of time, as possible, then you’re just about up to speed on this scandal, which amounts to a regressive stealth tax on every graduate in the UK. One which, it’s calculated, you would need to be earning £66,000 per year to pay off in anything like a timely fashion.
The debt burden of UK students is one of those things where, the more you look into the details, the more insane and predatory it is. So I tried my best to explain the numbers involved without making my, or your, head explode.
Screenshot of the staff scientist page of LIMS, showing profiles of ten of the eleven male scientists they list (no women)
Never heard of LIMS before, sounds interesting, but no room for women? 11/11 male scientists, 9/9 visiting scientists
After 5 years of developing, a new preprint from the lab - introducing our workflow for comparative insect connectomics, aimed at democratizing connectomics. @erc.europa.eu @lundvision.bsky.social @biologylu.bsky.social Read it here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Tony Benn was right then, and if he were alive today I'm sure he'd be right now.
Little smart critters..🪰🐝🐜
Cognitive primitives of the insect brain: Trends in Cognitive Sciences www.cell.com/trends/cogni...
Have you submitted your PhD since April 1st 2024, or might submit by the 31st March 2026? 📖 Do you know a student who wrote an excellent thesis and deserves some recognition? 🏅Nominations are open for the PSGB Napier Medal - submit a nomination by 31st March 2026: www.psgb.org/pages/95-nap...
Have you ever asked yourself, how insect brains represent places? And whether insects do have place cells? Then move to Germany this summer and start your PhD in my lab. We conduct tetrode recordings from bumblebees that freely forage laboratory mazes. 🧠🐝#BeeSpace @erc.europa.eu @neuroethology.org
Pace of ecology drives the tempo of visual perception across the animal kingdom www.nature.com/articles/s41... - new paper with Clinton Haarlem, Cliodhna Hynes and colleagues
Different species see the world as fast as they need to...
How to study adaptation in organisms that we can’t see, living in environments that we can’t visit? Some thoughts in our perspective piece out today in @pnas.org www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... @biology.ox.ac.uk @stuwest.bsky.social
Noted! 👀
I really don’t get why they settled, it seems like a defendable position - surely the acquisition of a degree is evidence they were educated as agreed, unless the claimants argue their degrees are meaningless and void, which seems like an odd pitch to employers?
The news about students seeking compensation from universities for COVID teaching has made me quite sad.
I can't say what happened at those universities, or what those student's experience was. My present university did not appear to be in the list.
But what I can say is...
I feel so miserable about this. Nearly broke myself working 16, 18 hour days during the pandemic. We did everything we possibly could, then doubled it, tripled it. HE is still struggling to get back off the floor, years later. Now another financial punch in the face.
www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
Academics: our workload is unmanageable!
Also academics: we have created an unnecessary additional step to this simple administrative task that requires at least three emails, a form and a meeting.
Happy birthday to one of my favourite haters, Charles Darwin
Can strongly recommend - great city to live in, fantastic colleagues in @bristolbiosci.bsky.social, only rains 96% of the time 👍
Now!
🎉 Celebrate the International Day of Women and Girls in Science! Join my inaugural lecture Social by Nature — exploring how social worlds shape animal minds
11 Feb 26 • 18:00–19:00 GMT • Cambridge + Online
Register: www.aru.ac.uk/events/inaug...
#EveryVoiceInScience #WomenInSTEM #LGBTQHistoryMonth
I am proud to present our recent #neuroethology paper on #magnetoreception in #ants today on the #InternationalDayofWomenandGirlsinScience where all authors are #WomenInSTEM @chiaratenne.bsky.social 🤩👩🔬🧪🧠🐜🧭
Thanks to @sfb1372.bsky.social for featuring our research in a video 🤩 doi.org/10.1007/s003...
The student loan system is now totally insane - reinforces social inequalities and is a massive drag in spending power for a big proportion of adults, which seems pretty bad for the economy
www.theguardian.com/money/2026/f...
