Sandra Steiger

🪳 New paper out – Part II!

Our 2nd study on the hormonal regulation of maternal care in the European earwig is now out!

We show that blocking juvenile hormone synthesis with Precocene reduces egg care in post-oviposition mothers, while JH supplementation has no effect.

doi.org/10.1016/j.yh...

Join us! Oxford is advertising an Associate Professorship in Animal Behaviour. my.corehr.com/pls/uoxrecru...

Hormonal regulation of parental care in insects: a call for exploring vulnerabilities to anthropogenic pollutants Global insect populations are declining at an alarming rate, threatening biodiversity and the ecosystem services on which humans depend. One potential…

Ever wondered how pollution affects insect parenting? 👀

Our new paper in Current Opinion in Insect Science digs into this question, highlights what we don’t know (yet), and lays out five priorities to push the field forward.

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

@

From constructing nests to nutritional provisioning: the impact of direct and indirect parental care in the burying beetle, Nicrophorus orbicollis - Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology Abstract Parental care has evolved multiple times in the animal kingdom and includes all parental traits that enhance offspring fitness. The evolution of care can lead to prolonged associations between parents and their offspring. This, in turn, can drive parent–offspring coevolution, creating systems in which multiple care behaviors are exhibited and potentially resulting in offspring becoming more dependent on parental care. Parental care often takes indirect forms, such as nest building, while direct care behaviors, like feeding, which involve physical interaction with offspring, are generally less frequent. However, in species where both types of care occur, the extent to which offspring rely on indirect versus direct care is often unknown. In this study, we investigated the roles and relative importance of direct and indirect care in a system where offspring are highly dependent on parental care. We conducted an experiment in which we manipulated the duration and composition of direct and indirect post-hatching care in the burying beetle Nicrophorus orbicollis. Burying beetles reproduce by exploiting small vertebrate carcasses, which they bury and convert into a nutritious nursery for their offspring. In addition to modifying the food resource, parents actively feed their offspring. We found that direct care had a greater effect on offspring growth and survival than indirect care, although indirect care also enhanced fitness. The greater reliance on feeding over indirect care is likely the result of sibling competition for food. Our study underscores the complexity and multi-layered nature of parental care strategies and their effects on offspring performance. Significance Statement Parental care enhances offspring fitness and can include both indirect care, like nest building, and direct care, like feeding. In systems where both care types occur, it is often unclear how much offspring rely on each type. As a model, we used Nicrophorus orbicollis burying beetles, which prepare a carcass as a nursery and regurgitate food to their offspring, to experimentally manipulate the duration and composition of direct and indirect care and assess their relative contributions to offspring survival and growth in this species. Our results show that while direct care has a stronger effect on offspring survival and growth, indirect care also provides measurable benefits. This study highlights the adaptive value of multi-component parental care strategies and the complex interactions between parents and offspring in species that depend heavily on parental care.

Family life in burying beetles. New paper out on the importance of direct and indirect care. Congrats to Madlen and Daniela!
link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Kicking off day 3 of #GradMeet25 with more talks on sociality — linking it to dispersal, cognition, and endocrinology! From social dispersal in burying beetles to hormonal changes in cheetahs 🐘🐅🦀🪲

@paulhuber.bsky.social @carolin-schlarb.bsky.social @robotowilliam.bsky.social

Illinois State University seeks an Assistant Professor in Behavioral Ecology. Candidates should establish research programs and mentor students. More details: https://jobsearch.illinoisstate.edu/en-us/job/520844/assistant-professor-of-behavioral-ecology. #job

#ISBE2026 Call for Abstracts is now open! Submit your abstract by 15 December 2025 on www.isbe2026.com

@behavecol.bsky.social

Analysis of communication and collective behavior in animal groups

⭐PhD position available!⭐
Come join us @imprs-qbee.bsky.social to study communication and collective behavior in animal groups! We're looking for someone excited to use computational approaches to tackle biological questions, using our full-group tracking datasets
imprs-qbee.mpg.de/121465/analy...

Kinship as a double-edged sword: Relatedness among burying beetle larvae enhances growth but increases mortality buff.ly/zpGurBS | #BiologyLetters #Behaviour #Ecology #Evolution

ecoevojobs.net 2025-26

UPDATE: The 2025-2026 list of faculty and postdoc positions in ecology and evolutionary biology is out! Be sure to check out this active and helpful community run resources! docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

Read the current issue of @jevbio.bsky.social here: academic.oup.com/jeb/issue

📸 Heiko Bellmann
Adult #Nicrophorus vespilloides #beetle in the act of feeding its
offspring atop a vertebrate carcass the beetles have monopolised.

The EAE group really enjoyed #DZG2025 in Berlin — great talks, inspiring discussions, and lots of fun!

Kinship as a double-edged sword: relatedness among burying beetle larvae enhances growth but increases mortality | Biology Letters Theoretical and empirical considerations suggest that relatedness can have complex effects on social life. While high relatedness may promote sibling cooperation and altruism through indirect fitness ...

New study on the effect of relatedness on larval cooperation in burying beetles: sibs boost growth, strangers boost survival. doi.org/10.1098/rsbl...
Congrats to Paul Huber and Daniel Wittmann!

Already adopted this method.

Was so nice to present our research and @unibayreuth.bsky.social at this DZG meeting! Glad to be talking about parental care and how it interacts with offspring immunity 🎉
Expect our upcoming paper that deals with this cool topic!🪲 @max-evolbio.bsky.social and I had a blast working on it
#DZG2025

Female burying beetle Nicrophorus vespilloides feeding a larva

Leptopilina heterotoma parasitc wasp

Hey #DZG2025, if you are interested in family life and/or communication, then come to the talks of J Plate-11:45 BEH, L Müller-12:15 BEH, M Körner-12:30 BEH, E Grubmüller-12:30 ECO (all today), J Sahm-11:30 EVOL (Thursday) and P Huber-12:45 BEH (Friday) and see the poster of M Cavalcanti!

👋 Looking forward to the 117th Annual Meeting of the German Zoological Society. Please like and share 🤩

See you at Berlin #dzg2025 .....if we ever arrive

Many thanks to all GEvol members for a truly wonderful annual meeting. It was really great to catch up with you all again.

🪲 New from BayCEER: Siblings matter!

Research shows burying beetle offspring thrive with siblings, even without parents. A surprising twist in how family life evolves!

🔗 Published in www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...
#Evolution #Beetles

@unibayreuth.bsky.social @steigerlab.bsky.social

New paper out on social immunity and burying beetles! Congrats to @leo-theo.bsky.social and @max-evolbio.bsky.social!

🔬 Last week at the BayCEER Colloquium, Dr. Maximilian Körner gave us a fascinating glimpse into the social lives of Nicrophorus #beetles 🪲

A fascinating and insightful talk that sparked great discussions!
@max-evolbio.bsky.social

Are you ready for the next talk?🌿

#SocialEvolution #Ecology

Please enjoy our paper about how potential pathogens can affect burying beetle offspring - even to some surprising effects!

Was a pleasure to work with @max-evolbio.bsky.social and @steigerlab.bsky.social on my first paper as a #firstgen PhD student!

New paper out on sibling cooperation in burying beetles! Big congrats to Paul Huber!

Dung beetle and larvae taken by Huber et al.

Better together: sibling cooperation matters! Burying beetle larvae consistently benefited from growing up with siblings, both with & without parents. Huber et al. show that sibling interactions can play a key role in the evolution of family life. Read now!
www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

👋 Hi Bluesky! I'm an evolutionary ecologist and about to launch my own research group at the University of Bayreuth (DE).
🔬 I will study the socioecology of animal-microbe interactions, asking how social behaviors in burying beetles shape - and are shaped by - interactions with microbes.
(1/2)

🎓 #PhD in Evolutionary Ecology @UniBayreuth 🇩🇪

Parental care vs microbe communities in burying beetles 🪲🧫
ERC-funded | 3 years | behavioral ecology & metabarcoding

Details: tinyurl.com/CareVsMicrobes

Apply by May 16, start in September

#AcademicSky #Microbiome #SocialEvolution #Insects

Die 1000 haben wir längst hinter uns gelassen. Wir gehen schon klar auf 2000 zu. 😀

Danke an alle, die schon gezeichnet haben. Macht gerne nochmal Werbung bei Kolleg:innen - auch insbesondere an Einrichtungen, die aktuell noch wenig Zeichner:innen haben.

www.bayceer.uni-bayreuth.de/s4f/de/top/o...

We do have an open, permanent position for an entomologist at the Bavarian State Collection of Zoology: snsb.de/en/curator-o...

Olfaction with legs—Spiders use wall-pore sensilla for pheromone detection | PNAS The sense of smell is a central sensory modality of most terrestrial species. However, our knowledge of olfaction is based on vertebrates and insec...

doi.org/10.1073/pnas...
Olfaction in spiders. We found that the wall pore sensilla in spiders look similar from the outside to those of insects, but differ ultrastructurally in various ways. Independent evolution!
🧪