Mason Youngblood

Out today in @plosbiology.org (1/5)

Siblings and non-parental adults provide alternative pathways to cultural inheritance in juvenile great tits 🐦🧩

Link to study:
10.0.5.91/journal.pbio...

Co-authors:
@lucymaplin.bsky.social
@galarconnieto.bsky.social

Bayesian analyses of radiocarbon dates suggest multiple origins of ceramic technology in Early Holocene Africa Nature Communications - Several possible points of origin have been proposed for the spread of ceramic technology in Saharan Africa between 11–10,000 years ago. Here, the authors...

⚠️Paper Alert!⚠️
Excited to share this paper with @roccoro.bsky.social where we examined whether ceramic technology in Saharan Africa was the result of a single or multiple episodes of innovation & diffusion
rdcu.be/eJi3g

Y'all these titles are getting out of control 😅

ESLR is currently undergoing a transition, and a new committee (@alexschakowski.bsky.social, @ahnisnaahsi.bsky.social, @katebonner.bsky.social, @lucahahn.bsky.social, @mariapykala.bsky.social) is working on reinstating its presence and shaping its future. Please feel free to get in touch!

My first PhD project is out there. Thank you to my advisor @psmaldino.bsky.social and to mentor, co-author and friend @babeheim.bsky.social for encouraging and helping build this exciting and insightful collaboration. Onwards!

Career Development Fellowship | Royal Society This scheme provides the most talented early career scientists from underrepresented groups in STEM with research funding and high-quality training opportunities to build a strong base for a successfu...

Fancy joining us?
Check out this excellent @royalsociety.org Career Development Fellowship:
royalsociety.org/grants/caree...
If you're eligible & are interested in social behaviour, vocal communication or anthropogenic impacts on wildlife, feel free to DM or email me.
@bristolbiosci.bsky.social

What if NIH had been 40% smaller? Replaying history with less NIH funding shows widespread impacts on drug-linked research

This may be the most important paper ever published about NIH funded research.

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Congrats @alexeykoshevoy.bsky.social!!!

Image showing Hobson Lab logo (with parakeets, a social network, and R code), two Monk Parakeets, and several individually-marked parakeets with the text "Now recruiting PhD students!!"

**PhD POSITIONS** I am recruiting 1-2 PhD students to work on sociality and cognition in Monk Parakeets, starting Fall 2026. Full ad is here: hobsonresearch.com/index.php/20... (please help spread the word!)

Tomorrow!

Miyagawa Shuntei's 1898 painting, "Playing Go (Japanese Chess)"

How to quantify the impact of AI on long-run cultural evolution? Published today, I give it a go!

400+ years of strategic dynamics in the game of Go (Baduk/Weiqi), from feudalism to AlphaGo!

The count down starts for #CESRabat! Follow @ces2026.bsky.social and join us May 11-13 next year for an exciting meeting in Rabat, Morocco.

Massive thanks to the #CESRabat organising committee:
Sarah Alami (co-chair)
Mathieu Charbonneau (co-chair)
Zachary Garfield
Edmond Seabright

Keep yours eyes out for some incredible work from @sobchuk.bsky.social in the coming years 🥳

TechnoMirage · Luma Join us for Reclaim, Reimagine, Rewire, a 3-part journey that pierces through the illusion of creative progress projected by AI. TechnoMirage is a half-day…

Performing "Alaka'i 1777" at Index Space (NYC) on 9/21 for TechnoMirage—a creative gathering exploring AI and speculative futures. Come hear extinct birdsongs in immersive spatial audio! 🦜 lu.ma/xda8t4h1

Author-Paid PublicationFees Corrupt Science and Should Be Abandoned Thomas J. H Morgan & Paul E. Smaldino

As grant money starts drying up, it's more important than ever not to waste it on paying publishers' open access "article processing fees" when we can host PDFs for free. Tom Morgan and I wrote a paper on this, forthcoming at Science and Public Policy. Accepted draft here: osf.io/preprints/os...

🧠 Want to integrate cultural evolution into your course using award winning materials created by the field's experts, and get paid $2000 to do it? 💵

🚨 The Cultural Evolution Society is seeking applications for the ACE Teaching Innovation Awards.

🔖 Apply here: vuw.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...

I'm pleased to share this new article by @svenkasser.bsky.social, Laura Fortunato @anthrolog.bsky.social, Marc Feldman and myself.

The article extends gene-culture coevolution to recognize evolutionary effects of culture arising through drift and migration.

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

We are pleased to announce our newly elected committee members of the Cultural Evolution Society:

Minhua Yan @minhuayan.bsky.social
Helena Miton @helenamiton.bsky.social
Wataru Toyokawa @watarutoyokawa.bsky.social &
Mason Youngblood @masonyoungblood.bsky.social

Welcome and congratulations!!

YouTube video by Wild Resonance Wild Resonance ep. 1: Animal Syntax in the Trees and Seas - a Conversation with Dr. Mason Youngblood

Such a pleasure to be the first guest on the new bioacoustics podcast Wild Resonance! 🦜🐳

youtu.be/1gEI7Ihibac?...

I totally understand, and thanks for the apology. Always down to chat about this stuff—I know there's a lot to debate about these patterns in other species (and how meaningful they actually are in general). All the best to you as well!

Do I see that the data for hybrids, which has a minor role in the paper and the smallest N, is v noisy? 100%, I have eyes. But a trend line is only a coarse summary, especially when accounting for other sources of variation. More in the paper if you decide to check your ego and stop projecting. 🙂

Wow okay. Sorry I thought I was dealing with an adult. Maybe you should read the paper before making aggressive critiques... That line of best fit comes from a model explicitly based on the mathematical formulation of Menzerath's law, accounting for individual identity and sequence ID...

What is your specific critique? I don't see any red flags with the plots, especially given the output of the models.

The drawing of an ant mound, titled "Soil secret surfaces: new communication method in an ant species?" with ants making various sounds. The sounds are labelled: "walking sound", "biting sound", "cleaning sound". One ant is producing a sound with a repeated pattern, and the label reads "unexpected sound". A text is under the representation of that sound, it reads: "Ants seem to react to it. Are they rubbing body parts to produce it?". Questions are at the bottom of the drawing: "Want to know how we recorded? What the sound could means? Full link to the study below!". There is also in the corner a QR code leading to the article mentioned.

Our latest study on ant acoustic communication originated from a project about soil health monitoring. A picture being worth a thousand words, I will let my abstract explain it all!
Here's the paper in #OpenAccess: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
#acoustics #animalbehaviour #entomology

How much does it cost to caw?

@wascherclaudia.bsky.social @masonyoungblood.bsky.social report that in 3 crow species, there is a strong negative relation b/t call sequence length & call duration --> they obey Menzerath's law of efficiency

1/2

#prattle 💬
#bioacoustics

Crow vocalizations show Menzerath’s law (indicator of efficiency), with some interesting age and sex differences! 🐦‍⬛

Posted a new preprint! Re-analysis of data from James and Sakata (2017) shows that zebra finches transform random songs to exhibit linguistic laws 🦜 osf.io/preprints/ps...

Animal Behaviour - Bielefeld University With a team of over 50 people, the different research groups study animal behaviour within the framework of the four questions of Tinbergen, both in the lab and in the field. Current model systems include laboratory studies on zebra finches (

Bielefeld University seeks a postdoc for a 6-year scientific assistant position in Animal Behaviour, starting March 2026. Apply by Sept 10, 2025. More info: www.uni-bielefeld.de/fakultaeten/biologie/forschung/arbeitsgruppen/behaviour #job

Two events at the Reforesters Laboratory—6/21 at 2:30 PM, and 6/22 at 12 PM. Links below!

lu.ma/db1o64b7
lu.ma/h90muqr5

My new installation Alaka’i 1777, which imagines the lost song culture of the Kauaʻi ʻōʻō, debuts in NYC 6/21-22! Come hear real-time simulations of extinct birdsongs in 24-channel spatial audio 🦜 Made possible by @cornellbirds.bsky.social @culturalevolsoc.bsky.social @divintelligence.bsky.social