Fantastic opportunity to work with us at Shark Bay Dolphin Research 👇🏻
15.02.2026 19:10
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Fantastic opportunity to work with us at Shark Bay Dolphin Research 👇🏻
Glad you like it! Yes, I came across the Zoophony. Super interesting work!
‘If musicality did not arise from language, where did it come from?’ New preprint, Curr. Biol. In press. : doi.org/10.31234/osf...
So proud to have supervised this project! Idea & analysis carried out by a very motivated and interested musician and colleagues 🎼🎶 who reached out to me about this great project to bring it to light. Thx to two phenomenal reviewers & the editors for their support!
Graphic explaining the process to annotate sperm whale codas in western music notation. Step 1: Graphic of a person with headphones, listening. Step 2: A Spektrogram, showing sound amplitude over time, with four sperm whale clicks and three musical beats as red line. Step 3: Western Musical Notation, a 3/4 rhythm, four notes are shown.
Paper Out in #NYAS: Using Rhythmic Notation and Musical Analysis on Animal Communication: A Case Study on Sperm Whales🔊🐳
doi.org/10.1111/nyas...
We use Western music notation to transcribe sperm whale codas. What can we learn about them using musical analysis🎼🎶?
I have prepared a video summarizing the study. Please come back here after reading the thread : )
youtu.be/bAk4PFEuWKQ English
also
youtu.be/CETjjZBMT5c Spanish
youtu.be/tkpjlCxDJZA German
(Thanks to Esau Dharma for providing the Spanish voice for Witgar Wiegele!)
Cow Tools!
We have lived alongside cows for nearly 10,000 years.
We breed them and exploit them
It is now, only now, that we have discovered THEY CAN USE TOOLS
Here I describe our study
(paper) www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... in @currentbiology.bsky.social
with @auersperga.bsky.social
Right side: A group of meerkats representing the researchers that submitted a symposia proposal for ECBB 2026. Left side: The sad, lonely meerkat representing the one that forgot. All by themself. Submission deadline 31 January!
We know you don't want to start your year by forgetting to submit a symposia proposal before the 31 January deadline.
www.aru.ac.uk/science-and-...
#academicsky #ecbb2026
New study alert! Sexually selected vocalizations of Greater Mouse-Eared Bats
We recorded male Myotis myotis in mating roosts and found complex vocalizations with an individual signature and pronounced seasonal variation. Check it out!
🔗 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
If you work on corvid ecology, behaviour, cognition, or conservation, this might be useful for you 👇
I’ve just published CORVIDATA in Scientific Data 🐦
doi.org/10.1038/s415... (1/4)
🚨Preprint doi.org/10.64898/202...
From the start of studying #rhythm production in animal vocs, I was sure rhythms can code #population info. Now shown for the 1. time in tawny pipits 🐦🎉🔊
Just as exciting: Even in arrhythmic song, rhythm parameters prove to be valuable in describing the signal.
Fig. 1. Spectrograms and oscillograms of (A) two meows and (B) two purrs. Oscillograms depict sound pressure over time, and spectrograms depict frequency over time. All spectrograms were created with a 1024-point FFT, 16-bit depth, and a Hamming Window with 87.5% overlap (sampling rate: 96 kHz, frequency resolution: 94 Hz, time resolution: 1.33 ms). The two pictures on the right depict Koda, a 15-year-old male Ragdoll cat, meowing and purring (credit: Marisa Idolo).
what's in a meow?? 🐈
New from @berlinbatlab.bsky.social!
1. "we examined meows and purrs to establish how individual identity is encoded"
2. stronger individual signature in purrs than in meows
3. domestic cat meows more variable than those of wild felids
#bioacoustics
#prattle 💬
#neuroskyence
Save the date information for the upcoming European Conference on Behavioural Biology: Animal Behaviour in the Anthropocene. 1-4 September 2026 at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK.
Save the date for the next European Conference on Behavioural Biology!
Animal Behaviour in the Anthropocene, 1-4 September 2026 at Anglia Ruskin University.
Watch this space for updates on speakers, plenaries, and calls for abstracts!
#AcademicSky #UpcomingConferences
A table showing profit margins of major publishers. A snippet of text related to this table is below. 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year.
A figure detailing the drain on researcher time. 1. The four-fold drain 1.2 Time The number of papers published each year is growing faster than the scientific workforce, with the number of papers per researcher almost doubling between 1996 and 2022 (Figure 1A). This reflects the fact that publishers’ commercial desire to publish (sell) more material has aligned well with the competitive prestige culture in which publications help secure jobs, grants, promotions, and awards. To the extent that this growth is driven by a pressure for profit, rather than scholarly imperatives, it distorts the way researchers spend their time. The publishing system depends on unpaid reviewer labour, estimated to be over 130 million unpaid hours annually in 2020 alone (9). Researchers have complained about the demands of peer-review for decades, but the scale of the problem is now worse, with editors reporting widespread difficulties recruiting reviewers. The growth in publications involves not only the authors’ time, but that of academic editors and reviewers who are dealing with so many review demands. Even more seriously, the imperative to produce ever more articles reshapes the nature of scientific inquiry. Evidence across multiple fields shows that more papers result in ‘ossification’, not new ideas (10). It may seem paradoxical that more papers can slow progress until one considers how it affects researchers’ time. While rewards remain tied to volume, prestige, and impact of publications, researchers will be nudged away from riskier, local, interdisciplinary, and long-term work. The result is a treadmill of constant activity with limited progress whereas core scholarly practices – such as reading, reflecting and engaging with others’ contributions – is de-prioritized. What looks like productivity often masks intellectual exhaustion built on a demoralizing, narrowing scientific vision.
A table of profit margins across industries. The section of text related to this table is below: 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year.
The costs of inaction are plain: wasted public funds, lost researcher time, compromised scientific integrity and eroded public trust. Today, the system rewards commercial publishers first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge.
We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing:
a 🧵 1/n
Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Amazing opportunity to work with @stephanielking.bsky.social AND Dolphins 🐬
A richly annotated dataset of co-speech hand gestures across diverse speaker contexts www.nature.com/articles/s41... Dataset comprising 2373 annotated gestures, 9 speakers across 3 distinct categories: University lecturers, Politicians, and Psychotherapists can be accessed at doi.org/10.17605/OSF...
BehaveAI is live!
Our biologically inspired video analysis tool sees motion as colour. Track animals or objects, classify their behaviour, and handle complex natural scenes with ease.
Semi-supervised annotation, no GPUs required, user-friendly, free & open source.
Pre-print tinyurl.com/BehaveAI
Only 5 days left to register! ⏰
Don’t miss the chance to connect with animal behaviour researchers from around the world and discover the latest in behavioural science.
📅 13–14 November; free, online & open to all worldwide 🌍
🔗https://ablaoc25.sciencesconf.org/
🧠🌟🐭 Excited to share some of my postdoc work on the evolution of dexterity!
We compared deer mice evolved in forest vs prairie habitats. We found that forest mice have:
(1) more corticospinal neurons (CSNs)
(2) better hand dexterity
(3) more dexterous climbing, which is linked to CSN number🧵
1️⃣ month to go! ⏰
#ABL2025, our annual international online conference is on the 13–14 Nov 🎉
6 plenaries • 24 talks • 40+ posters • 3 workshops • lively Discord chats.. and more !
🌐 Free registration — register now!
👉 ablaoc25.sciencesconf.org
Paper & incredible science alert: Our assistant professor @laurastidsholt.bsky.social & a passionate team @elena-tena.bsky.social @ebdonana.bsky.social found proof for greater nocturnal #bats 🦇 preying on migratory birds 🐦 AND devouring them in flight! #bioacoustics
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
This year marks the 100th birthday of #bioacoustics, established by Ivan Regen in 1925, which studies how animals hear, produce and propagate sound.
Let’s discover this discipline with @nicolasmathevon.bsky.social, Professor of Saint Etienne University, in the first episode of Acoustic World.
🚨🚨Job! 🚨🚨Permanent (75% time) job! We are a pretty awesome research group & seek a manager who deals with everything: personnel tasks, organizing retreats, preparing code for teaching / data structures for research... Fluency in German & English essential. stellenboerse.uni-mainz.de#/jgu/job/51527
Brown rats are preying on bats at urban hibernation sites – even snatching them mid-air. Conservation efforts must include non-native rodent control at key bat roosts.
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Golden eagle on the nest in Finland (by O. Karlin)
🦅PhD position 🦅 in my new group at @fbm-unil.bsky.social in Switzerland, studying how the social and resource landscapes shape the learning process for soaring flight. Deadline: Oct 30. Pls repost! career5.successfactors.eu/career?caree...
Brilliant work on the ontogeny of rhythm in zebra finches. "Shared rhythm goes beyond copying the temporal features of individual elements; tutees ...adjust the rhythm of non-shared intervals". 🔊 @lsburchardt.bsky.social & al: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
This could hint at two evolutionary strategies:
🐢 one favoring rhythmic precision and consistency,
🦜 the other favoring novelty and flexibility.
So now we’d love to test whether female finches prefer rhythmic accuracy or creativity — does rhythm consistency matter for attractiveness? 🎧🐦
🧵6/6
We also found intriguing differences between tutees:
🎶 Those who copied all elements of a motif sang slower, more consistent rhythms.
🎶 Those who improvised more in terms of element sequence showed faster, less consistent rhythms.
🧵5/6
So, what’s happening?
It seems the shared rhythm goes beyond copying individual notes. Tutees might adjust the timing of new, improvised parts so the entire motif still matches their tutor’s rhythm.
🧵4/6
Turns out they do — but with a twist🥨.
Tutees’ overall rhythms were most similar to their own tutors’, only when considering the full motif.
When we looked at just the shared or non-shared elements, those rhythms diverged.
🧵3/6
