Vladimir Pravosudov

Assistant Professor of Biology The Biology Department at Oberlin College invites applications for a full-time tenure track faculty position in the College of Arts and Sciences in conservation ecology. Initial appointment to this po...

🚨🚨 New tenure track position in #ConservationBiology @oberlincollege.bsky.social in the #Biology department--come join us, and contribute to our brand new Environmental Science major too! #biologyjobs #ecologyjobs

jobs.oberlin.edu/postings/16671

Animal Cognition job at Hunter College CUNY: cuny.jobs/new-york-ny/...

Adult mountain chickadees are molting heavily - but juveniles look much ‘cleaner’

It’s that time of the year again - nutcrackers are going after pine cones

Social pairing in the absence of reproductive senescence in a socially monogamous songbird Older, more experienced individuals may make better mates than young, inexperienced individuals, but reproductive ability often declines in old ages. Mount

New paper from the lab by @jwelklin.bsky.social
In mountain chickadees, there is positive assortment by age in pairing, but such assortment appears due to pair longevity rather than active mate choice based on age.
academic.oup.com/beheco/artic...

Schematic of the structure of the paper. We looked at dietary differences between ages and sexes, seasons and habitat types. We looked at the identity of prey in the diet and the number of dietary items.

New publication! 🚨

If you're looking for a paper on what great tits eat then this is for you! 🦋🐛🐞🪲🐦

We looked at variation in diet using DNA metabarcoding and found lots of differences between adult and young birds and between habitat types.
@ucc.ie

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

YouTube video by Selection shapes diverse animal minds Cognitive evolution: the mechanisms may be simple but their fine-turning may not be

Today's highlighted talk is a great contribution by Arnon Lotem, discussing the evolution of learning mechanisms and their fine-tuning to fit different species' needs youtu.be/At9uqrPNz5Y @royalsocietypublishing.org @cornishjackdaws.bsky.social

🧪 CRITICAL UPDATE: The House draft version is now out.

✅ Like the Senate's version, there's no cut to NASA's budget.

❌ There's a 23% proposed cut to NSF's budget.

8-page summary: appropriations.house.gov/sites/evo-su...

Draft bill: appropriations.house.gov/sites/evo-su...

YouTube video by Selection shapes diverse animal minds What is it like to be an octopus?

The next in our series of highlighted talks from our @royalsocietypublishing.org discussion meeting on "Selection Shapes Diverse Animal Minds" is by Rob Barton (University of Durham): youtu.be/tVqgb0PosHw

Elevation-related differences in annual survival of adult food-caching mountain chickadees are consistent with natural selection on spatial cognition - Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology Abstract Animals inhabiting montane gradients experience varying winter climates that may result in differential selection on survival-related traits. Higher elevations in temperate climates are chara...

Varies between 0.5 and 0.75 at high elevation. Adult survival is higher at higher elevations because of strong selection on juveniles.
link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Banded last two chickadee nests of the season at high elevation. In one nest, both parents are 9-years old and bred together for many years. And their nestlings weigh quite a bit more than the average. In chickadees, older patents raise higher quality offspring. Here is 9-yr old female

The Secret to Song Sparrows' Extraordinary Success Lies in Their Genome This ordinary-seeming songbird species is teeming with subtle genetic diversity, which allows local populations to respond in various ways to a changing world.

A thing I've been working on is out now: I wrote the cover story for the summer issue of Living Bird! Scientists have sequenced the genomes of almost all 25 (!) song sparrow subspecies AND connected their genes to how they're each likely to fare under climate change.

YouTube video by Selection shapes diverse animal minds Spandrel brain? Human brain expansion as a means to another end

Today's highlighted talk is by Maurico Gonzalez-Ferrero @mauriciogforero.bsky.social, talking about evolutionary expansion of the human brain @royalsocietypublishing.org youtu.be/vhqKSSYMPaQ

If you’re starting grad school in Fall 2025 (or planning to apply and start in Fall 2026), this is a foundation award similar to federal grad fellowships (like NSF GRFP). Always worth applying if you’re an eligible student!

Lots more detail about this work in this nice thread from @andreaestandia.bsky.social. A collaboration with @nilomr.bsky.social @jon-slate.bsky.social funded by @erc.europa.eu and @ukri.org grants

bsky.app/profile/andr...

Predicted relationship between physical distance (breeding location) and identity-by-descent for different pairwise comparisons of breeding Great Tits in Wytham Woods, Oxfordshire. The effect of distance is strongest for pairs of locally-born birds, and weakest (but non-zero) for pairs of immigrants

Summary of the performance of a random forest classifier trained on 600 000 SNP genotypes to discriminate between immigrant and locally-born Wytham great tits

Like many 'populations' the great tits in Wytham are a meta-population, with extensive immigration. We know very little about who & what immigrants are - here @andreaestandia.bsky.social et al use genomic data to try to understand origins & consequences of immigrants
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

YouTube video by Selection shapes diverse animal minds A circuit view of evolving cognition by Dr Stephen Montgomery

Selection shapes diverse animal minds: We recorded the talks at our @royalsocietypublishing.org discussion meeting last year to share with those who couldn’t be there. Our first speaker is Stephen Montgomery (Bristol University) @ebablab.bsky.social. youtu.be/BzmRZlhTcrc?...

YouTube video by Selection shapes diverse animal minds Social drivers of cognitive evolution: the importance of strategic decisions

Next up is co-organizer Alex Thornton @cornishjackdaws.bsky.social talking about social drivers of cognitive evolution @royalsocietypublishing.org. youtu.be/yb4iSyPPaaI?...

Living on the edge: the evolution of spatial cognition in food-caching chickadees | Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences There is a tremendous amount of intra- and inter-specific variation in animal cognitive abilities, and understanding the evolutionary mechanisms generating such variation is an important issue in evol...

New paper from the lab - the overview of our long-term work on selection on spatial cognition in chickadees.
royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences: Vol 380, No 1929

Selection Shapes Diverse Animal Minds: our special issue of @royalsocietypublishing.org Phil Trans B on the diverse evolutionary processes underlying cognitive evolution is out today. Thanks to all our contributors! royalsocietypublishing.org/toc/rstb/202...

Just got this from NSF:

On June 20, 2025, the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, in No. 1:25-cv-11231-IT, vacated NSF’s 15% Indirect Cost Rate policy (NSF 25-034). In compliance with the court’s decision, NSF will not implement the policy at this time.

Sierra summer

Two months back I had the honour to visit UC Davis (kindly hosted by @katelaskowski.bsky.social) to give a Storer Lecture on the power of long-term studies of individuals in ecology & evolution. Great people doing great science despite the current climate. Video ⬇️

video.ucdavis.edu/media/The+Po...

Jay Bhattacharya is Not the NIH Director Seventy-Five Days of Embarrassing Ineptitude

“The humiliation and censorship of the world's leading scientists and doctors, destroying research grants on a completely arbitrary collection of buzzwords linked to an imagined ‘woke mind virus,’ is a pathetically childish temper tantrum with utterly criminal impacts on the nation ...”.

Our field work requires various skills

Barn swallow, Reno
#birds