Blair Costelloe

@asab.org Spring, aimed at ECRs, is coming to Bristol!

Conference grant DEADLINE for Developing Country Applicants (<£2500) or anyone needing an early decision for visas (<£750) is in ONE WEEK, 1st December.
www.asab.org/conference-g...

Referee statement also needed by then! 🐝🐜🦟🦂🐠🐟🐬🦎🐸🦆🐿️🦓

FERAL goes wild:
🦓 Drone footage of Grevy’s zebras (with @blaircostelloe.bsky.social, Ben Koger and @icouzin.bsky.social)

Pose-estimation pipelines struggled to detect vigilance behavior from overhead drone videos.
FERAL identifies vigilance bouts directly from video.

So impressed with this software! Check it out!

Give FERAL:
1. videos
2. behavioral annotations

FERAL fine-tunes a video foundation model on your data.

FERAL outputs:
- segmented ethograms
- model weights you can reuse

All in few lines of code (no ML or coding expertise needed). It runs easily on Google Colab.

Try it yourself: www.getferal.ai

FERAL: A Video-Understanding System for Direct Video-to-Behavior Mapping Animal behavior unfolds continuously in time, yet quantitative analyses often require segmenting it into discrete, interpretable states. Although manual annotation can achieve this, it remains slow, s...

Our preprint is out! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Peter Skovorodnikov and I are excited to present FERAL: a new video-understanding toolkit that maps raw video directly to behavior, no pose estimation required.
It works across species, from lab to field, and even in collective systems. (🧵1/n)

The amount of AI generated art in slides at this conference, primarily used by older scientists, is killing me. Scientists please. Don’t use these ai platforms to make your figures or slides. They look bad and I have yet to see them meaningfully improve the message of talks.

Opportunity to join our team. Open to African students at Masters or PhD level.

I wanted to get a video of this ghost crab but every time I got close to their hole they scuttled back in, so I tried getting clever with it. I made a little sandcastle and shoved my phone into it, hit record, and walked away. Crab was VERY suspicious of this addition to their environment.

We built a calculator that doesn't work, but don't worry, it's also a plagiarism machine that will tell you to kill yourself. It runs on the world's oceans and costs 10 trillion dollars.

I want to explain a few things and then it might be clearer why UK trans people are upset.
In 2001 I married my wife, Sylvia.
In 2005 I started medical transition. (1/13)

students in last year's advanced bootcamp on software development and version control

view of the Highseas Conference Center where the course is held

🍂 Applications are now open for our ML-for-Behavior 5-day course at Jackson Labs in Bar Harbor, ME.

Talks and hands-on workshops cover pose estimation, supervised/unsupervised behavior quantification, and downstream behavior analyses. Financial aid is available!

www.jax.org/education-an...

Current Vacancies

I am currently advertising a new 3-year research position in my TerraLuma team: Research Associate in Drone Field Operations (Academic Level A)

The position will support the Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network’s (@TERN_Aus) Dronescape project.

careers.utas.edu.au/cw/en/job/50...

Announcing the WildDrone Summer School Sept 22-26. Registration open at wilddrone.eu/summer-school/

Join us in Konstanz for a week of drones, computer vision and conservation ecology! 🧪🌍

Announcing the WildDrone Summer School Sept 22-26. Registration open at wilddrone.eu/summer-school/

Join us in Konstanz for a week of drones, computer vision and conservation ecology! 🧪🌍

Hot off the press 📣: one of the most surprising and unsettling findings of my PhD. A novel social tradition emerged in the tool-using white-faced capuchins of Jicarón island… abducting and carrying the infants of another species. Thread with gifs, videos, and all the bizarre details 👇

An illustration of a white-faced capuchin monkey carrying a howler infant on their back while cracking nuts with a stone

Humans have many unusual traditions. But did you know animals’ strange behaviors can become culture too? Out now in Current Biology (doi.org/10.1016/j.cu...) we show the rise and spread of a surprising tradition: interspecies infant abduction. Interactive timeline (www.ab.mpg.de/671374) 🧵 (1/12)

Exclusive: NSF faces radical shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions Changes seen as a response to presidential directives on what research to fund

This is an absolute disaster. If we don't stop this, they will turn NSF into a pawn of the Trump administration. There will be no research on climate, biodiversity, or anything that isn't eugenics or AI or how to more efficiently destroy the planet for profit.

This cannot be allowed to happen.

A graphic for the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA), showing a historical portrait of Marie Skłodowska-Curie overlaid with an image of four young researchers walking down a hallway. The European Commission logo is in the top left. Text reads: "Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions – €404.3 million to support postdoctoral researchers”

Choose Science. Choose Europe.

A new Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Postdoctoral Fellowships 2025 call is now open.

With a budget of €404.3 million, it will support around 1,650 researchers from Europe and beyond.

Apply by 10 September → europa.eu/!fBTMgF

Postdoc job alert! I'm hiring a 3-yr postdoc to work on our Social Modifiers of Primate Lifespans grant. Job info and how to apply below. Deadline June 1. Pls share! jobs.exeter.ac.uk/hrpr_webrecr...

4 12x18 inch posters on a brick and concrete wall. The top left is pink and says funding science saves lives, written in microbes, next to a microscope. The one on the right says Biology is bigger than binaries, with a fish, a lily, and a bee. The bottom left says Protecting wildlife starts wtih you, with a bunch of adiorable woodland creatues in yellow, white and black, including an owl, fungi, a... um. weasel? salamanders, butterflies, slugs, and a rotting log. The bottom right says Will our oceans thrive or nosedive the choice is yours, with the ocean represented in a circle, half of which is dead and half of which is alive, including kelp and a mackerel

🚨 Cool new project alert 🚨

WE- you, me, everyone- need to work together to get important science messages out to people.

4 artists & 3 scientists collab'd on these posters. We hope YOU will put them out in your community. Each poster comes w/info about each topic.

Get 'em Squidfacts.bigcartel.com

The outcome of our @asab.org Interdisciplinary Workshop (a great initiative! see www.asab.org/workshop-gra... for funding support) is now published.
Led by @marinapapa.bsky.social and me, with contributions from all workshop participants as co-authors!
paper: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Senior Marine Ornithologist Do you want to use your scientific and research expertise to play an important role in decisions made on the sustainable delivery of marine renewables and the marine environment?

Two Senior Marine Ornithologist posts at the Marine Directorate of the Scottish Government. Deadline for applications is 21/04/2025, 23:59 #seabirds #ornithology #renewables
fa-evxn-saasfaukgovprod1.fa.ocs.oraclecloud.com/hcmUI/Candid...

OK here it is, the moment you have all been waiting for! Our advert for 5 posts here at Glasgow: Cognitive neuroscience/psychology. Closing date May 12 - please spread the word
www.nature.com/naturecareer...

Follow us on social media! BlueSky and Instagram will be our new main accounts. Check back for conference information, outreach, and opportunities for involvement in ABS :)

Looking forward to taking part in this Women in Data Science event next Friday, March 7th! More info and registration here: widscambridge.org

The new Max Planck Postdoc Program adresses young scientists.

‼️Save the date‼️The new Max Planck #Postdoc Program kicks off its first call for applications from April 1, 2025; applications can be submitted until May 13, 2025. mpg.de/en/max-planc... #ScienceCareer

We have two openings for stipended ugrad fellows at the Conservation Technology Lab at the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance.

One is in CV/ML for field camera systems:

us242.dayforcehcm.com/CandidatePor...

Second is in field device design (image or sound):

us242.dayforcehcm.com/CandidatePor...

Pls share: Konstanz School of Collective behavior from 21st July - 8th August. Application deadline: April, 15. An amazing line up of speakers spanning all aspects of collective behavior . For info: www.exc.uni-konstanz.de/kscb/
@cbehav.bsky.social @mpi-animalbehav.bsky.social

list of banned keywords

🚨BREAKING. From a program officer at the National Science Foundation, a list of keywords that can cause a grant to be pulled. I will be sharing screenshots of these keywords along with a decision tree. Please share widely. This is a crisis for academic freedom & science.

1/ Exactly this 🎯 I’ve had many conversations & email exchanges in the past few days with people worried their entire programs will grind to a halt. multiple jobs are on the line in in-country programmes. The Musk-Trump combo could be disastrous for tackling #IWT in the longer term