Andrew Straw

The diversity of lepidopteran spatial orientation strategies – neuronal mechanisms and emerging challenges in a changing world - Journal of Comparative Physiology A The Lepidoptera, butterflies and moths, display an astonishing diversity of spatial orientation strategies essential for survival, reproduction, and ecological success. These spatial orientation strat...

Nice review, congratulations and thanks to all authors! And nice complement to the following recent review (with many authors in common on both publications): link.springer.com/article/10.1...

A summary figure for a NeurIPS competition where AI agents compete with mice in a visual foraging task.

Mice learn these tasks and are robust to perturbations like fog. Now, we invite you all to make AI agents to beat mice.

We present our #NeurIPS competition. You can learn about it here: robustforaging.github.io (7/n)

Locating nests of endangered bumble bees: Lessons from field trials in northern Germany Tracking bumble bees to find their nests using coloured strips of paper stuck to their thorax proved to be the most suitable method, while radio transponders were too heavy. Tracking times of up to .....

We discuss various strategies for locating nests of the rare and endangered above-ground nesting bumblebee species Bombus muscorum. Although we did not find any nests, we were able to track bees marked with paper strips for up to 800 m.
@jki-research.bsky.social
@nabu.de

doi.org/10.1111/icad...

We'd bee happy about that!

The tracks are 3D. We have stereo cameras on one drone. But indeed more drones would be better and help with occlusion.

That's a cool idea!

Thanks and you're welcome! So far it's just a preprint and I already confirmed that our granting agency is (grudgingly) willing to pay open access frees.

Many contributed directly or indirectly! Authors: Rachael Stentiford, Michael JM Harrap, Victor V. Titov, Stephan Lochner. @ttvodoan.bsky.social was instrumental in creating fast lock with a @hfspo.bsky.social fellowship. @biologyunifreiburg.bsky.social @uni-freiburg.de. @brainworlds.bsky.social
9/9

Photograph of multicopter drone and bee hive.

This work is a technical demonstration that multicopter drones can track honey bees in 3D across landscapes with trees and other structure.

Huge thanks to the @volkswagenstiftung.de who believed in our original "high-risk" idea. Also to @dfg.de for later funding to improve tracking precision.

8/9

Heat map showing the proportion of flight aligned to the target "Inbound - Gap", at different angular thresholds when the trajectories are divided into 20 segments.

Relating to the waggle dance, @freelyflyingbees.bsky.social, @schuemaa.bsky.social, and others have shown this dance is somewhat imprecise. Our results suggest this dance imprecision is not constrained by limits in bees' spatial representation. (Maybe, like me, they are just bad dancers.)

7/9

Scatter plots of bee trajectories crossing planes at select locations along their route.

The precision with which the bees repeatedly fly the same route surprised us. At one location near a prominent tree, we measured for each bee a spread of just 50 centimeters around the median. Elsewhere, over a cornfield, the trajectories were more variable.

6/9

Random convergence of olfactory inputs in the Drosophila mushroom body - Nature In Drosophila, olfactory sensory neurons project to spatially invariant loci (glomeruli) and stereotyped circuitry is maintained in projections to a brain centre thought to mediate innate behaviours; ...

Could the individual variability arise from random wiring of (visual) inputs to the mushroom body www.nature.com/articles/nat... @thecaronlab.bsky.social ? Or from variability in visual neuron wiring @linneweberlab.bsky.social @bassemh.bsky.social www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...?

5/9

Outbound and inbound trajectories from two bees.

We discovered individual honey bees typically have their own preferred route and, in the vicinity of nearby landmarks, fly repeatedly very nearly the same trajectory.

@mnjeschke.bsky.social @martinegelhaaf.bsky.social recently found similar in bumble bees in lab-based tunnel experiments.

4/9

2025 Component Abuse Challenge: Overdriven LEDs Outshine The Sun Tagging wildlife is never straightforward in the best of times, but it becomes a great deal more complicated when you’re trying to track flying insects. Instead of trying to use a sensor package, […

The reflector, glued to the bee, would reflect light from "outshine the sun" LEDs hackaday.com/2025/11/06/2... back to our drone-mounted fast lock tracking system strawlab.org/publications....

3/9

Bee with reflective marker.

We selected bees that had learned to forage from our sugar-water feeder. Such bees were flying repeatedly back-and-forth every few minutes and, after catching them, we would glue a reflector to them and release them again. (And we were often able to remove the reflector again when done.)

2/9

Have you ever wondered what you would find if you could keep your eyes on a bee for more than a few meters? Us, too!

preprint (with videos!) + thread 🧵

Precise, individualized foraging flights in honey #bees 🐝 revealed by multicopter drone-based tracking

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

1/9

Job Alert! The Institute for Neuro- and Behavioural Biology at the Faculty of Biology @uni-muenster.de invites applications for a Full Professorship (W3) in “Systems Neuroscience” - Highly attractive research environment at the Multiscale Imaging Center. Apply by January 5th. See shorturl.at/VczFp

2025 Component Abuse Challenge: Overdriven LEDs Outshine the Sun Hackaday Article

2025 Component Abuse Challenge: Overdriven LEDs Outshine the Sun

The cognitive ecology of wild bumblebees

New #PhD ad alert!
Interested in wild #bee #cognition and #brains in different #bumblebees? Want to live in #Newcastle and the beautiful north-east of England?

Check out this project with me, @lenariab.bsky.social and Sarah Scott. Contact me for further information.

iapetus.ac.uk/studentships...

overdriving LEDs, for the bees This project is about maxing out the LEDs. Can we drive them harder than the datasheet allows? We need this to overpower daylight, to see bees that wear retroreflective markers, as if was at night.

Lab member and hacker extraordinaire Victor Titov has entered the Component Abuse Challenge @hackadayofficial.bsky.social with the LEDs on our bee tracking drone. hackaday.io/project/2043.... Check out the video! Thanks @volkswagenstiftung.de @dfg.de @biologyunifreiburg.bsky.social @uni-freiburg.de

New preprint from the lab: A reference brain for the clonal raider ant.
With this resource, which is based on 40 individual brains, you can register and compare all kinds of samples in a common space. It comes with lots of detailed protocols and a user-friendly GUI.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Faculty First Responders Mutual Aid for Academic Freedom

This is a supreme example of mutual aid among academics. Faculty First Responders monitors the media of the anti-intellectual far right to notice when fellow scholars are being targeted, and offers practical support and guidance.

facultyfirstresponders.com

This infographic describes the main results from a survey of members of 14 scientific societies. There is a pie chart showing that both academic (58%) and non-academic (42%) responded to the survey. It lists statistics: 85% of respondents reported uncertainty about the future; 71% reported federal training programs were "very" or "extremely important"; 83% reported negative impacts or irreparable harm on their field of science. There is a word cloud summarizing open-ended responses with the largest words "student research fund federal grant". Eight major themes in the responses are listed: disruption of research with societal important; concerns of closure of the USGS Bird Banding Lab; Early Career Bottleneck; Restricted Freedoms including travel and speech; Decline in Government Efficiency and Expertise; Concerns about Biased/Removed Data and Data Gaps; Concerns about the Ability to Meet Legal Mandates; and From Positive Impact to Irreparable Harm. There are icons for each participating society and a QR code for website and data availability.

Today 14 scientific societies in #ecology #evolution and #marineScience are publishing the results of a survey that finds negative impacts of federal policies on food security, flood mitigation, infectious disease preparedness, and wildlife conservation: 🧪👩‍🔬 www.firsthandaccounts.org/impacts/2025...

Acute stress modulates early visual perception and decision-making speed in bees without compromising accuracy Acute stress is known to influence decision-making, but it can also directly affect earlier stages of sensory processing. In humans, stress alters the perception of basic visual features, fine-tuning ...

Look - it's a new preprint!

Predatory attacks change bee visual perception and decision-making, making bees better prepared to detect threats.

Excellent work by the brilliant Olga Procenko for her (prize-winning) PhD with us! #bees #vision #predation

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

‘Half the tree of life’: ecologists’ horror as nature reserves are emptied of insects A new point in history has been reached, entomologists say, as climate-led species’ collapse moves up the food chain even in supposedly protected regions free of pesticides

Reports of insect decline are not new but they are worsening. International data has estimated annual losses between 1%-2.5% each year.

But this is a newer phenomenon: catastrophic collapse of insect populations in supposedly protected regions that are free of destructive insecticides & pesticides:

Informational graphic for the FRIAS Fellowship Programmes 2026/27. It lists three types of fellowships: Early Career Fellowships – 4 to 10 months for researchers with a doctoral degree and up to 8 years of postdoctoral experience. Senior Fellowships – 3 to 8 months for researchers with a doctoral degree and at least 8 years of postdoctoral experience. Sustainable Governance Senior Fellowship Programme for Researchers from Africa – 6 months for researchers with a doctoral degree, at least 8 years of postdoctoral experience, and affiliation with an institution in Africa. Application deadline: 13 September 2025, 13:00.

Are you a #PostDoc or #Professor seeking time to focus on your research in a vibrant, international community?
Apply now for the FRIAS Fellowship Programme 2026/27!
Deadline: 13 Sept 2025, 13:00
#Fellowship #AcademicJobs #CfA
🔗https://uni-freiburg.de/frias/funding/frias-fellowship-programmes/