Chinmay Hemant Joshi

Bumble bees that follow a stricter routine innovate less: Foraging behaviors, environmental complexity, and how they relate to novel problem solving https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03.06.710156v1

📣 Call for Applications: The University of Vienna invites applications for more than 40 fully funded doctoral positions across a broad range of disciplines in Life Sciences and Natural Sciences. 👨‍🔬👩‍🔬 #PhDSky #PhD #univie
📅 Application period: 2 March – 27 March 2026, 12:00 CET

More information: ⤵️

🐜 European Ant Identification Workshop 2026 🐜

📍 Banyuls-sur-Mer, France
📅 June 3–7, 2026

A hands-on workshop focused on European ant diversity, collection methods, and identification — set in the amazing Mediterranean–Pyrenean place of Banyuls-sur-Mer 🌿🏞️

The Burmeister Lab: Studying Microbial Evolution and Extinction ​Our research integrates evolutionary biology and microbiology, using bacteria and phage as study systems to address fundamental questions in both fields. ​ ​We study microbial evolution, a...

Alita Burmeister (@aburmeister.bsky.social) is looking to hire a postdoc (or potentially a PhD student) for projects on phage resistance and evolution. The position description is posted to the Eco-Evo Jobs wiki and also available on her lab's website (arburmeister.weebly.com).

This looks very exciting! Hoping we can discover many many more cool insects than we ever dreamt of.

I'm hiring a technician! www.cam.ac.uk/jobs/researc...

An 80% role in a 4-yr BBSRC project and hopefully beyond. Looking for someone to support the @socialfluids.bsky.social 🧪our ants 🐜 and our projects.

Looking for someone kind + conscientious + reliable who takes pride in a job well done.

Fascinating findings!

This is what I love about behavioral ecology experiments. Simple and clever experimental designs can elegantly answer important questions.

GitHub - chjoshi24/t-maze-laser-cricut-designs: This repository contains designs for T-mazes with different stem and arm lengths. You can use it to create T-mazes using different materials for your wo... This repository contains designs for T-mazes with different stem and arm lengths. You can use it to create T-mazes using different materials for your work. - chjoshi24/t-maze-laser-cricut-designs

Looking to build T-mazes for behavioral experiments? I’ve shared open, fully editable designs on my GitHub repository linked below. I used these designs for my own experiments.
Happy to chat if further if you have any questions !

There is still some time to submit for our Special Collection on social cognition and anthropogenic environments! We are looking forward to hear from you! link.springer.com/collections/... Please do get in touch if you have any questions.
#openaccess #socialcognition

Job advertisement

I am looking for a PhD working on tracking trait changes in insects/spiders at the Leibniz Institute for the Analysis of Biodiversity change @leibnizlib.bsky.social and the University of Hamburg.
Apply here: www.uni-hamburg.de/en/stellenan...

Don't be put off by the ad saying "UK Students only" - a limited number of scholarships are available for international candidates. So please apply!

Persist or Give up? Fire ants motivated to search for a high-quality food source even if they don’t know how to find it Finding resources for the colony is one of the most difficult and risky tasks for a social insect worker. A worker on a foraging trip can face a number of challenges, including interference from other...

Pre-print alert 🚨🐜!!!
I am really excited to share results from the first empirical chapter of my PhD. We ( @dornhaus.bsky.social and I) set out to examine how fire ants deal with perturbations to communication during foraging. Turns out their foraging is not robust to this perturbation. (1/5)

🚨 New postdoc opportunity in Aotearoa 🇳🇿 with @drhhnz.bsky.social

RA / Postdoctoral Fellow in honeybee bacteriophages, microbial genetics & molecular evolution at the University of Canterbury (Christchurch).

3-year position, starts March 2026.
🔗 jobs.canterbury.ac.nz/jobdetails/a...

PhD position(s)🚨deadline 20th Jan

1-development of brain & behaviour in the precocial spiny mouse tinyurl.com/yaxhy5y2
2-social behaviour & neurophysiology in a menstruating rodent using AI tinyurl.com/ykv93cts

apply ✍️

@ai4bicdt.bsky.social @sidb-edinburgh.bsky.social @edinunineuro.bsky.social

🐜 4-year #postdoc position in the @socialfluids.bsky.social lab @camzoology.bsky.social investigating metabolic cooperation between bodies in a BBSRC-funded project.

www.cam.ac.uk/jobs/postdoc...

#ants #socialtransfers #sociallytransferredmaterials #autophagy #socialinsects #aging #job (🧵1/n)

The Economy of Knowing Why Metascience Needs Micro and Macro

"Ultimately, good science is produced by the individual people and the small teams within larger systems."

Great perspective on why world needs behavioral ecology and behavioral ecologists !!!

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The deadline to apply for PhD positions with me (or anyone in my department!) are coming up: Jan 7th.
www.zoo.cam.ac.uk/study/postgr...

Are you an early-stage graduate student (2nd or 3rd year) or early-stage postdoc based in the US or Canada, working primarily in Drosophila? Would you like to help improve the experience of all trainees working in Drosophila research? If so, read on.

(Please repost to reach a broad audience.)

Application of robustness framework in a comparative context across different social insects using different communication systems may allow us to uncover when and how robustness is prioritized. (5/5). Excellent review to know more about biological robustness: www.nature.com/articles/nrg...

Ants that did not abandon made random choices. This shows that fire ants heavily rely on pheromone trails over memory to navigate. With huge colony sizes, there may be little pressure for every forager to have strong individual memory. (4/5)

Most ants abandoned the food source in the face of this perturbation. But ants searching for the higher-quality food source were more persistent and less likely to give up. Higher food quality, therefore, pushes the ants to explore for food despite the lack of information. (3/5)

We removed a small section of the pheromone trail leading to a low or high-quality food source on a T-maze and examined individual ant responses. We utilized the robustness mechanism framework from systems biology to examine whether ants can compensate for this disruption to communication. (2/5)

Persist or Give up? Fire ants motivated to search for a high-quality food source even if they don’t know how to find it Finding resources for the colony is one of the most difficult and risky tasks for a social insect worker. A worker on a foraging trip can face a number of challenges, including interference from other...

Pre-print alert 🚨🐜!!!
I am really excited to share results from the first empirical chapter of my PhD. We ( @dornhaus.bsky.social and I) set out to examine how fire ants deal with perturbations to communication during foraging. Turns out their foraging is not robust to this perturbation. (1/5)

Most ants abandoned the food source when the trail was disrupted. But ants searching for the higher-quality food source were more persistent and less likely to give up. Higher food quality, therefore, pushes the ants to explore for food despite the lack of information. (3/5)

We removed a small section of a trail leading to a low or high-quality food source on a T-maze and examined individual ant responses. We utilized the robustness mechanism framework from systems biology to examine whether ants can compensate for this disruption to communication. (2/5)

Social plasticity and individuality shape variation in contest behaviour Abstract. Physical contests are critical in most animals in determining access to limited resources such as territories, food and sexual partners. Individu

New paper out in @royalsocietypublishing.org Biology Letters. We show that variability in contest behaviour can emerge from plastic responses to modest size differences between focal males and their rivals.

#Drosophila
#Diptera

royalsocietypublishing.org/rsbl/article...

Ancient Plants Used Infrared Radiation to Attract Their Pollinators - Harvard University - Department of Molecular & Cellular Biology Long before flowers painted the planet in brilliant colors, some of Earth’s earliest plants were glowing—not with pigment, but with heat. A new study from the lab of […]

Ancient Plants Used Infrared Radiation to Attract Their Pollinators #research 🧠 🧪🧬 #AcademicSky #higherEd
www.mcb.harvard.edu/department/n... @nbellono.bsky.social @rachellegaudet.bsky.social @harvardoeb.bsky.social @science.org