PBrakes

Swim4TheOcean One man attempting to swim 1,000 miles of treacherous coastline. To ignite New Zealanders around the race for a healthy ocean.

🩵 Current obsession is checking the swim4theocean @LiveOcean site to see Jono Ridler’s progress. Swimming the east coast North Is - Aotearoa New Zealand to get people thinking & talking about bottom trawl fisheries. Epic human 👊🏻🩵 🏊‍♂️ liveocean.org/swim4theocea...

New paper!🚨 Social dynamics of group bubble net feeding in humpbacks. Congratulations Éadin for such an awesome first PhD paper!! 🐳🧪🦑

Two time options:

▪️ Monday 26 January, 20:00 - 21:30 UTC: engage.iucn.org/event/online...

▪️ Tuesday 27 January, 08:00 - 09:30 UTC: engage.iucn.org/event/online...

Just like humans, many animal species have distinct cultures. From communication and social learning, animal culture shapes how they live and adapt. 🦍🐒🐳

Join an #IUCN introductory webinar and learn what animal culture is and how it can support biodiversity conservation and recovery.

Links below!

Our new paper (with @biotay.bsky.social) is out and on the cover story of @currentbiology.bsky.social !!!! Veronika, a Carinthian mountain cow flexibly uses a “multi-purpose tool” to scratch herself. A video and more information will follow in the comments.
www.cell.com/current-biol...

Red List Status & Extinction Risk of the World’s Whales, Dolphins and Porpoises published in Conservation Biology showed that 1 in 4 cetacean species (26% of 92) were assessed as threatened (Critically Endangered, Endangered, Vulnerable)
conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Making Behavioral Science Work for Conservation (SSIR) At its core, conservation is about behavior change. Yet few organizations have put in place the structure, standards, and accountability needed to apply behavioral science effectively.

📢 “At its core, conservation is about behaviour change.”

New @ssir.org article highlights why behavioural science must be central to conservation - from project design to evaluation and systems change.

Read more 👉 ssir.org/articles/ent...

#Conservation #BehaviouralScience #BehaviourChange

Bridging oceans and communities with Mana Tūāpapa Future Leader Fellowship Behavioural ecologist and conservation scientist Dr Philippa Brakes has been awarded a Mana Tūāpapa Future Leader Fellowship from Royal Society Te Apārangi.

Looking forward to getting cracking on this in 2026 with colleagues around the motu.
Thanks to @royalsocietynz.bsky.social
www.massey.ac.nz/about/news/b...

The 5 stages of the ‘enshittification’ of academic publishing Academic publishing now shows the same decline that has hit social media and online marketplaces.

“Reclaiming academic publishing as a public good requires a return to not-for-profit models & sustainable open-access systems. Quality, accessibility & integrity need to be put ahead of profit. Change is needed to protect the purpose of academic research: to advance knowledge in the public interest”

New episode!! 🎙️🎉

A chat w/ @pbrakes.bsky.social about animal cultures and animal conservation.

Culture was once thought to be uniquely human. No longer. We now know culture is found throughout the natural world. How does this complicate conservation?

Listen: disi.org/the-value-of...

2025: Adrift in a warming world - University of Wollongong – UOW How disappearing habitats are sending marine mammals into uncharted waters

EF member Dr Katharina Peters has co-authored an interesting publication examining the rising number of marine mammals who in recent years have been found beyond their natural habitat 🐳

Read more via the below UOW media release.

kjpeters.bsky.social

www.uow.edu.au/the-stand/20...

🌍 Dream of adventure in the heart of Africa? Boost your career in conservation or research as a field researcher on wild bonobos in the DRC! Paid, full training, project management skills & epic experience await.

Apply ASAP & RT to share! 👉 bit.ly/bondiv2025 #conservationjobs #research

Cooling, such as refrigeration and AC, is currently responsible for 7% of global greenhouse gas emissions.

UNEP’s new guide outlines a framework to unlock the cooling sector’s potential to reduce emissions as part of national climate plans: www.unep.org/resources/re...

Now this is cool #womeninSTEM

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 👇

I will forever be haunted by this footage.

Trawling has only been filmed underwater a few times in documentary history, and never with such clarity.

What’s so heart-rending about these shots is watching how the animals don’t just get swept up — they swim for their lives.
🌎🦑🧪

Herring spawned poleward following fishery-induced collective memory loss - Nature A critically low abundance of older herring due to age-selective fisheries resulted in an approximately 800-km poleward shift in main spawning.

Nature research paper: Herring spawned poleward following fishery-induced collective memory loss

https://go.nature.com/4jLJ2C4

Wonderful cover, and amazing research by Zhang et al. - they used classic Chinese poetry that mentions the Yangtze finless porpoise (724 poems in total!) to estimate the range contraction of the species over the last 1400 years. Such a creative approach to generate truly novel data!

The demographic drivers of cultural evolution in bird song Social learning can give rise to shared behavioral patterns that persist as culture within animal communities,1,2 such as bird and whale songs and cet…

New paper on the demographic drivers of cultural evolution in Great Tit song published today - epic work led by @nilomr.bsky.social with help from @andreaestandia.bsky.social Ella Cole & Sara Keen. Why did we do this, and what did we find? 🧵 follows: 1/n
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Animal culture recognized as key factor in new conservation strategies Exeter scientists are among those who have discovered many animals learn and pass on behaviors through social learning or culture, which could have important implications for conservation.

phys.org/news/2025-05...
Unravelling some of the complexity of animal cultures & conservation with @lucymaplin.bsky.social,
@emma-carroll.bsky.social, Alison L Greggor, Andrew Whiten, @ellengarland.bsky.social & contributors to our theme issue
doi.org/10.1098/rstb... @royalsocietypublishing.org

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences: Vol 380, No 1925

New theme issue in Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B @royalsocietypublishing.org:

Animal culture: conservation in a changing world

Edited by @pbrakes.bsky.social, @lucymaplin.bsky.social, @emma-carroll.bsky.social, Alison L Greggor, Andrew Whiten and @ellengarland.bsky.social

doi.org/10.1098/rstb...

🐳 UPCOMING BOOK ALERT 🐬
The Evolution of Cetacean Societies

Edited by @darrencroft.bsky.social @andrewfoote.bsky.social @stephanielking.bsky.social and myself

Preorder available now
press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...

#whale #dolphin #animalbehaviour

Demographic interactions between the last hunter-gatherers and the first farmers | PNAS Demographic interaction processes play a pivotal role during episodes of cultural diffusion between different populations, particularly when these ...

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Why whale urine is so important to life in the sea Their carcasses and faeces are also important to the ocean.

Why whale urine is so important to life in the sea - new article in @uk.theconversation.com by @exeter.ac.uk researchers Kirsten Freja Young & Marion Rossi

@exetermarine.bsky.social 🐳