Chinmay Hemant Joshi

Persist or Give up? Fire ants motivated to search for a high-quality food source even if they don’t know how to find it Finding resources for the colony is one of the most difficult and risky tasks for a social insect worker. A worker on a foraging trip can face a number of challenges, including interference from other...

Pre-print alert 🚨🐜!!!
I am really excited to share results from the first empirical chapter of my PhD. We ( @dornhaus.bsky.social and I) set out to examine how fire ants deal with perturbations to communication during foraging. Turns out their foraging is not robust to this perturbation. (1/5)

🚨 New postdoc opportunity in Aotearoa 🇳🇿 with @drhhnz.bsky.social

RA / Postdoctoral Fellow in honeybee bacteriophages, microbial genetics & molecular evolution at the University of Canterbury (Christchurch).

3-year position, starts March 2026.
🔗 jobs.canterbury.ac.nz/jobdetails/a...

PhD position(s)🚨deadline 20th Jan

1-development of brain & behaviour in the precocial spiny mouse tinyurl.com/yaxhy5y2
2-social behaviour & neurophysiology in a menstruating rodent using AI tinyurl.com/ykv93cts

apply ✍️

@ai4bicdt.bsky.social @sidb-edinburgh.bsky.social @edinunineuro.bsky.social

🐜 4-year #postdoc position in the @socialfluids.bsky.social lab @camzoology.bsky.social investigating metabolic cooperation between bodies in a BBSRC-funded project.

www.cam.ac.uk/jobs/postdoc...

#ants #socialtransfers #sociallytransferredmaterials #autophagy #socialinsects #aging #job (🧵1/n)

The Economy of Knowing Why Metascience Needs Micro and Macro

"Ultimately, good science is produced by the individual people and the small teams within larger systems."

Great perspective on why world needs behavioral ecology and behavioral ecologists !!!

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The deadline to apply for PhD positions with me (or anyone in my department!) are coming up: Jan 7th.
www.zoo.cam.ac.uk/study/postgr...

Are you an early-stage graduate student (2nd or 3rd year) or early-stage postdoc based in the US or Canada, working primarily in Drosophila? Would you like to help improve the experience of all trainees working in Drosophila research? If so, read on.

(Please repost to reach a broad audience.)

Application of robustness framework in a comparative context across different social insects using different communication systems may allow us to uncover when and how robustness is prioritized. (5/5). Excellent review to know more about biological robustness: www.nature.com/articles/nrg...

Ants that did not abandon made random choices. This shows that fire ants heavily rely on pheromone trails over memory to navigate. With huge colony sizes, there may be little pressure for every forager to have strong individual memory. (4/5)

Most ants abandoned the food source in the face of this perturbation. But ants searching for the higher-quality food source were more persistent and less likely to give up. Higher food quality, therefore, pushes the ants to explore for food despite the lack of information. (3/5)

We removed a small section of the pheromone trail leading to a low or high-quality food source on a T-maze and examined individual ant responses. We utilized the robustness mechanism framework from systems biology to examine whether ants can compensate for this disruption to communication. (2/5)

Persist or Give up? Fire ants motivated to search for a high-quality food source even if they don’t know how to find it Finding resources for the colony is one of the most difficult and risky tasks for a social insect worker. A worker on a foraging trip can face a number of challenges, including interference from other...

Pre-print alert 🚨🐜!!!
I am really excited to share results from the first empirical chapter of my PhD. We ( @dornhaus.bsky.social and I) set out to examine how fire ants deal with perturbations to communication during foraging. Turns out their foraging is not robust to this perturbation. (1/5)

Most ants abandoned the food source when the trail was disrupted. But ants searching for the higher-quality food source were more persistent and less likely to give up. Higher food quality, therefore, pushes the ants to explore for food despite the lack of information. (3/5)

We removed a small section of a trail leading to a low or high-quality food source on a T-maze and examined individual ant responses. We utilized the robustness mechanism framework from systems biology to examine whether ants can compensate for this disruption to communication. (2/5)

Social plasticity and individuality shape variation in contest behaviour Abstract. Physical contests are critical in most animals in determining access to limited resources such as territories, food and sexual partners. Individu

New paper out in @royalsocietypublishing.org Biology Letters. We show that variability in contest behaviour can emerge from plastic responses to modest size differences between focal males and their rivals.

#Drosophila
#Diptera

royalsocietypublishing.org/rsbl/article...

Ancient Plants Used Infrared Radiation to Attract Their Pollinators - Harvard University - Department of Molecular & Cellular Biology Long before flowers painted the planet in brilliant colors, some of Earth’s earliest plants were glowing—not with pigment, but with heat. A new study from the lab of […]

Ancient Plants Used Infrared Radiation to Attract Their Pollinators #research 🧠 🧪🧬 #AcademicSky #higherEd
www.mcb.harvard.edu/department/n... @nbellono.bsky.social @rachellegaudet.bsky.social @harvardoeb.bsky.social @science.org

Sonoran Desert landscape looking west across Avra Valley from Tucson Mountain Park. In the foreground, a desert trail winds through cholla cacti, saguaros, ocotillo, and native shrubs. The valley stretches to distant mountain ranges on the horizon under a dramatic sky of blue patches and white cumulus clouds with rays of light breaking through.

Please pass along - We've extended the CAMBIUM fellowship deadline to December 15! Our NSF NRT supports new grad students to harness biodiversity big data to adapt to & mitigate climate change impacts. Great fit for evolutionary genomics, bioinformatics, ecology & more. cambium.arizona.edu 🧬🌐🌎

The allotetraploid lycophyte Selaginella rupincola growing among the boulders at Cochise Stronghold in the Dragoon Mountains southeast of Tucson, Arizona.

Xanthisma spinulosum growing outside a gym in Tucson, Arizona.

Selaginella arizonica X eremophila hybrid zone at Alamo Canyon in Organ Pipe National Monument.

A Dieteria sp. being visited by a skipper in the White Mountains of Arizona.

I'm recruiting PhD students for the Barker Lab @uofa-eeb.bsky.social We study plant evolutionary genomics - polyploidy, hybridization & machine learning for genome evolution. Work with Selaginella, Xanthisma, Brassica & more. Funding available via CAMBIUM Fellowships. Reach out if interested! 🧬🌵🤖

‘Almost unimaginable’: these ants are different species but share a mother Ant queens of one species clone ants of another to create hybrid workers that do their bidding.

A common type of ant in Europe breaks a fundamental rule in biology: its queens can produce male offspring that are a whole different species

go.nature.com/4mOb5T9

I'm looking for a graduate student (either PhD or master's) to join my lab starting Jan 2026. If you know any students in social behavior and evolution (and termites!), please let them know!

go.bsky.app/8zZNEGV

Great resource to connect early career folks with more senior scientists looking to hire postdocs! 🧪

I made one for PhD students as well and I'm recruiting to make ones for PIs! bsky.app/starter-pack...

Hello! Can you add me to this list? Thank you! @oceanfilly.bsky.social

Simons Graduate Fellowships in Ecology and Evolution The purpose of these awards is to provide support for students entering U.S.-based Ph.D. programs with a plan to perform research in ecology and evolution. While we will consider all projects in ecolo...

Simons Graduate Fellowships in Ecology and Evolution
Award: $265,800 for 3 years worth of full time support
Eligibility: entering or applying for Ph.D. programs in biology or a subfield of the life sciences during fall 2025
Deadline: LOI due July 31, 2025
www.simonsfoundation.org/grant/simons...
🧪 🧠

Hello World!
After almost a month of starting a research group - finally the announcement :)
We are the 'Active Sensing Collectives' group (tinyurl.com/yckehxys) at the CASCB in the University of Konstanz. We're still growing, see PhD position ad below. @cbehav.bsky.social @uni-konstanz.de z.de

Social insect and cognition postdocs, check these positions in Berlin, with super nice supervisor Tomer! :)