Zoë Goldsborough

After many years of trying to combine my 2 passions, art 🎨 and science 👩‍🔬, into something meaningful, i have created an educational #ChildrensBook! 📚

✨ Meet The Rimba🦧, a gentle, lyrical tale about a wise orangutan guardian spirit who protects her rainforest home and the creatures who depend on it.

Culture is critical in driving orangutan diet development past individual potentials - Nature Human Behaviour Howard-Spink et al. develop an empirically based model of orangutan diet development, which suggests that social learning is vital for orangutans to acquire varied diets.

Our New Paper is out in Nature Human Behaviour: 🚨 Culture is critical in driving orangutan diet development past individual potentials! 🦧 www.nature.com/articles/s41.... See 🧵

Burden of a failed error culture in biologging Driven by technological advancement and low cost, biologging has rapidly transformed the study of animal behaviour and ecology, providing unprecedente…

For your consideration, our paper about how we can build a better error culture around biologging is now out in Animal Behavio(u)r. A collaborative effort between researchers the veterinarians at @mpi-animalbehav.bsky.social

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Fatal Flaws are Ingrained in Laboratory Animal Research - But who cares? When we began looking closely at laboratory animal experiments, we found that despite the enormous time, cost, and care involved, studies had biased designs. The problem appeared systemic. We set out ...

2025. Fatal Flaws are Ingrained in Laboratory Animal Research-But who cares? "we conducted a structured review of animal experiments published in North America and Europe in 2022... not even one followed the principles of rigorous experimental design." communities.springernature.com/posts/fatal-...

Intrigued by animal innovation and avian cognition? My PI Dr. Megan Lambert is advertising a new shiny PhD position studying innovation in kea parrots! Info attached 🤩🦜
For inquiries: Megan.Lambert@vetmeduni.ac.at

🎉 Congratulations to Kat Stewart 🎓 for succesfully defending her thesis "Factors influencing intergroup encounter dynamics in a wild bonobo 🐒 population: the untold story of risk, reward and the roots of warfare", supervised by Barbara Fruth 🥂

Fully-funded 4-year #PhD in Cultural Evolution! Join my @erc.europa.eu project exploring how compression & compositionality drive cultural innovation: hmc-lab.com/ERCPhDCultur...
Apply by Nov 12!
Maybe of interest to folks from #COSMOS2025 or @eslr.bsky.social? Please feel free to share! 🙏

Want to know more about monkeys kidnapping other monkeys?🐒 I had an amazing chat together with @bjjbarrett.bsky.social on @sidedoorpod.bsky.social about the Coiban capuchins and their wild antics. Science really is stranger than fiction! Listen 👂 here: www.si.edu/sidedoor/mon...

A causal framework for the drivers of animal social network structure Author summary Behavioural ecologists ask mechanistic questions about behaviour—causal questions. When studying animal societies, these questions often concern the drivers of social network structure....

Are you studying animal sociality?

My (now published) first PhD chapter proposes a Bayesian + causal framework to infer the factors shaping the social relationships that animals form with one another.

journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

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...

I am humbled to have received much praise for THE ARROGANT APE (Avery / Penguin Random House) out September 2.

www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/717436/the-arrogant-ape-by-christine-webb

WeTransfer just changed their TOS giving themselves permission to train AI on any content you transfer and produce derivative works based on content you transfer that they are allowed to monetize and you are not allowed payment for.

Stop using WeTransfer.

❓Why do the Nordics & Dutch speak English so much better than the Germans, Italians & French?

➡️ New Working Paper:

Out-of-School Learning: Subtitling vs. Dubbing and the Acquisition of Foreign-Language Skills
w/ F. Baumeister & E. Hanushek

www.nber.org/papers/w33984

A 🧵 1/12

~5 years, 5 chapters, and one real human baby later, my "academic" baby is finally done. After a defense in near-boiling conditions, where even the beamer quit halfway through, I am now officially Dr. Zoë 🎓🐒 I am so grateful for this experience, and all my friends and family lifting me up! #PhDone

been a long time coming, there's now a preprint along with Will Hoppitt describing our new R package for creating, fitting and interpreting bayesian NBDA models (STBayes). www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1.... Documentation is here michaelchimento.github.io/STbayes/inde...

Rise and spread of a social tradition of interspecies abduction Goldsborough and colleagues report the origin and spread of a cultural tradition of interspecies abduction of infant howler monkeys by male white-faced capuchin monkeys in the wild.

In a recent correspondence, @zoegoldsborough.bsky.social and colleagues report the origin and spread of a cultural tradition of interspecies abduction of infant howler monkeys by male white-faced capuchin monkeys in the wild. www.cell.com/current-biol...

Kidnapping im Tierreich: "Man hört die Brüllaffen nach ihren entführten Babys schreien" Auf einer unbewohnten Insel vor Panama entdeckt die Doktorandin Zoë Goldsborough Unglaubliches: Kapuzineraffen kidnappen Jungtiere anderer Affen. Bleibt die Frage, warum.

🐒🚨„Affen kidnappen Babys anderer Affenart“. Habt ihr diese unglaubliche News gelesen - von #Kapuzineräffchen und #Brüllaffen in #Panama? Bio-Doktorandin @zoegoldsborough.bsky.social hat‘s entdeckt. Mir hat sie erzählt, was hinter dem traurigen Kidnapping steckt: www.zeit.de/wissen/umwel... @zeit.de

This Was Odd: These Monkeys Kidnapped Babies From Another Species.

Monkeys kidnap the babies of other monkeys, and then wear them around for days on end... it's a grim tale I've written for the @nytimes.com!

www.nytimes.com/2025/05/19/s...

Some sketches for this surprising publication by ‪ @zoegoldsborough.bsky.social @mpi-animalbehav.bsky.social @bjjbarrett.bsky.social @meg-crofoot.bsky.social @livingingroups.bsky.social
Capuchin monkeys abducting howler monkey infants and carrying them around! 😐

Rise and spread of a social tradition of interspecies abduction Goldsborough and colleagues report the origin and spread of a cultural tradition of interspecies abduction of infant howler monkeys by male white-faced capuchin monkeys in the wild.

🧪🏺 Capuchins kidnapping howler infants: fascinated by many aspects of this- rapidity of 'fashion' spread, individual variation but also sex bias, and relevance in helping us imagine multiplicity of inter-species hominin interactions, inc. #Neanderthals & early H. sapiens
www.cell.com/current-biol...

Thank you!

Thank you!!

This Was Odd: These Monkeys Kidnapped Babies From Another Species.

The capuchins on Jicaron are intriguing everyone, from scientists to the general public 🙈 Stories from our latest paper by @zoegoldsborough.bsky.social @bjjbarrett.bsky.social and team!

Paper: www.cell.com/current-biol...

🧵

@lizlandau.bsky.social

www.nytimes.com/2025/05/19/s...

YouTube video by Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior Capuchin monkeys are abducting baby howlers. But why?

#Capuchins are abducting baby howlers. But why?
Zoë Goldsborough, Brendan Barrett, and Meg Crofoot
@mpi-animalbehav.bsky.social discuss what’s behind this novel animal tradition. www.youtube.com/watch?v=mooQ... @zoegoldsborough.bsky.social

Thank you, Sofia! :)

Researchers puzzle over rash of baby monkey kidnappings Young, male capuchin monkeys have started kidnapping the babies of nearby howler monkeys. Why? Maybe boredom.

Young, male capuchin monkeys have started kidnapping the babies of nearby howler monkeys. Why? Maybe boredom.

Very different mammals follow the same rules of behavior Research hints at an underlying architecture that orders the movements of animals

Cross-species teamwork from @livingingroups.bsky.social reveals unexpected similarities in three social mammals 🤔

By lead author @pminasandra.bsky.social with Emily Grout, Katrina Brock, Meg Crofoot, Vlad Demartsev, Amlan Nayak, Eli
Strauss, Ari Strandburg-Peshkin🧵1/2

www.ab.mpg.de/679000/news_...

Capuchin monkeys kidnap baby howler monkeys, shocking scientists The disturbing fad could be the result of boredom.

Therapist: The kidnapping capuchin monkeys aren't real and can't hurt you.

Nature:

www.popsci.com/environment/...

Scientists studying footage from Jicarón Island spotted something unusual: a capuchin monkey carrying an infant howler on his back. Now, they’re trying to learn what it means. cnn.it/3H1dtWA