Sandra Winters

A u shaped structure made out of sticks called a bower, built under a small tree. In front of the bower is a pile of grey, white and green objects that make up the display court. The whole scene is in dappled sunlight and shade created by the tree above.

New bowerbird paper out, we asked whether male great bowerbirds care about the light environment around the bower where they display to females. Short answer: not really. What they do care about is having a display arena with strong visual contrast on the ground. 🐦 tinyurl.com/2v7rycdz

A long blue-brown trumpetfish swimming above and close to a blue stoplight parrotfish

🚨NEW PAPER🚨 Need to #camouflage on the move? Easy - simply seek out something that's coloured like you and move along with it! 🐠 Read the latest #trumpetfish instalment here: tinyurl.com/4tb5h5hk
@royalsociety.org
#shadowing #predator #experiment #marine #movement

Excited to soon start my new role as Academy of Finland Research Fellow 🦋🐛I’ll later be advertising a PhD position on tiger moth colour and genomics, and will be speaking at #ESEB2025 this week if you want an idea of what’s going on!

Antagonistic effects of predator color morph abundance and saliency on prey anti-predator responses Predators can have different color morphs, but whether morph abundance or saliency is more influential in shaping antipredator behavior in prey remains unc

🔴New #trumpetfish content!🔴 This species is colour #polymorphic so we dove (pun intended) into how the relative abundance and saliency of each morph influences the #behaviour of their prey. Find out more via the link below! 🎺🐠
🔗 tinyurl.com/39vn5skp #behavioralecology

"I don't know why people have such a hard time getting papers accepted. Back in my day I published in Nature all the time."

🐠💥2 year postdoc in fish sensory ecology!! 💥🐟
If you’re into animal colour, collective behaviour, predator-prey interactions, enjoy behavioural experiments and fieldwork, please apply! Based in Oxford with fieldwork in northwest Thailand (and elsewhere). Please repost! www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DNM294/p...

Mandatory reading for anybody in German academia: #ichbinHanna #WissZeitVG

📢 Meet the speakers: Johanna Mappes 📢

@JohannaMappes is an evolutionary ecologist from the University of Helsinki (@helsinkiuni), Finland.

Read more about her here: eseb2025.com/team/johanna-mappes

Biologically inspired warning patterns deter birds from wind turbines Wind power has been at the forefront of investment and innovation in renewable energy. However, bird fatalities from collisions with wind turbines present an ecological and social challenge to the gro...

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

New paper in pre print!

A gray wolf clone with dire wolf DNA edits.

It's not a dire wolf. It's a gray wolf clone with 20 dire-wolf gene edits, and with some dire wolf traits. And here's my story! Gift link: www.nytimes.com/2025/04/07/s...

I say this every time de-extinction comes up: it makes no sense to devote science to bringing back extinct animals when we can’t be bothered to keep extant ones alive in the first place.

Great kick-off by my team @aplantaginis.bsky.social at #OIKOSFin25! 🎉 @zowioudendijk.bsky.social shared fascinating insights on the evolution of reflex bleeding in Arctiinae, and @theobrown.bsky.social made a compelling case for 'why to pay to be lazy'(—if you’re a toxic butterfly!) 🦋🔥

Scatterplot titled “Empirical Evidence of Ideological Targeting in Federal Layoffs: Agencies seen as liberal are significantly more likely to face DOGE layoffs.” • The x-axis represents Perceived Ideological Leaning of federal agencies, ranging from -2 (Most Liberal) to +2 (Most Conservative), based on survey responses from over 1,500 federal executives. • The y-axis shows Agency Size (Number of Staff) on a logarithmic scale from 1,000 to 1,000,000. Each point represents a federal agency: • Red dots indicate agencies that experienced DOGE layoffs. • Gray dots indicate agencies with no layoffs. Key Observations: • Liberal-leaning agencies (left side of the plot) are disproportionately represented among red dots, indicating higher layoff rates. • Notable targeted agencies include: • HHS (Health & Human Services) • EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) • NIH (National Institutes of Health) • CFPB (Consumer Financial Protection Bureau) • Dept. of Education • USAID (U.S. Agency for International Development) • The National Nuclear Security Administration (DOE), despite its conservative leaning (+1 on the scale), is an exception among targeted agencies. • A notable outlier: the Department of Veterans Affairs (moderately conservative) also faced layoffs despite its size. Takeaway: The figure visually demonstrates that DOGE layoffs disproportionately targeted liberal-leaning agencies, supporting claims of ideological bias. The pattern reveals that layoffs were not driven by agency size or budget alone but were strongly associated with perceived ideology. Source: Richardson, Clinton, & Lewis (2018). Elite Perceptions of Agency Ideology and Workforce Skill. The Journal of Politics, 80(1).

The DOGE firings have nothing to do with “efficiency” or “cutting waste.” They’re a direct push to weaken federal agencies perceived as liberal. This was evident from the start, and now the data confirms it: targeted agencies overwhelmingly those seen as more left-leaning. 🧵⬇️

Firings are happening right now at the National Science Foundation. Essential staff are being cut.

This isn’t about the budget. If it was, they’d be going after the military (17%) or state appropriations (38%). NSF is 0.7% of the federal budget. All federal employees make up only 4% of the budget.

PLEASE SHARE: Postdoc Opportunity in Montpellier France. 18 months starting May 2025: Generative AI for Studying the Influence of Habitats on the Diversification of Bird Color Patterns. Applications and information here: tinyurl.com/2368teak
@evoldir.bsky.social

*POSTDOC JOB* If you are excited about animal sociality/cognition, are computationally-inclined, and are looking for a postdoc, I'll be hiring soon! Please come talk to me today or tomorrow at #SICB2025, or reach out over email. Official ad coming soon!

swaRmverse logo

Fully-funded PhD: Comparative analysis of collective behaviour in natural and artificial systems.

Supervised by Andrew King and myself at Swansea University, @rjpheathcote.bsky.social (Oxford) and Marina Papadopoulou (Tuscia).

Come fly in the swaRmverse!

www.swansea.ac.uk/postgraduate...

If you like genomics, speciation, and primates, this PhD position is for you! Unraveling the genomic architecture of speciation and gene flow in a crazy group of monkeys at U of Edinburgh . Do reach out with questions!
evol.mcmaster.ca/brian/evoldi...

Dusky langurs - an example of primate natal colouration

🐵📢 I am recruiting a postdoctoral researcher to work for 6-months on our NSF-BBSRC project investigating the form and function of primate natal coats. Why are some🐒 babies🍊?!

www.swansea.ac.uk/jobs-at-swan...

Please pass on to potential applicants and get in touch if considering applying.

Postdoctoral Researcher in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Postdoctoral Researcher in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Please re-post: I have a postdoc position open! Helsinki is great and working environment is fantastic! #colours #polymorphism #behavior #experiments #lepidoptera jobs.helsinki.fi/job/Helsinki...

There's still a couple of days before the deadline for TWO not one postdoc positions! One is on avian life histories, the other one is on general life history theory, with much flexibility on what precisely.

If you hate statistics like I do, then you'll love my free lectures. Putting science before statistics, 20 lectures from basics of inference & causal modeling to multilevel models & dynamic state space models. It's all free, made with love and sympathy. 🧪 #stats www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...

We are hiring! Two RA positions at NHM London and a postdoc at University of Sheffield as part of a grant on convergent evolution. We strongly encourage diverse applicants to apply. Feel free to email me or Gavin Thomas for more details or if you have any questions 1/3

Things that Darwin hated, a 🧵

To Charles Lyell, 1st Oct 1861

But I am very poorly today & very stupid & hate everybody & everything. One lives only to make blunders.— I am going to write a little Book for Murray on orchids & today I hate them worse than everything

And if you vote in a state that requires another US citizen to sign your request, and you're in the Helsinki area, I am very happy to do this!

If you vote in MARYLAND and you have a MD state ID, you can request a ballot online: voterservices.elections.maryland.gov/onlinemailin...
Deadline for voting in the primaries: May 10, 2024
Deadline for voting in the general election: November 1, 2024

Federal Voting Assistance Program Ensuring Service members, their eligible family members and overseas citizens can vote -- from anywhere in the world.

US Citizens living abroad: remember to request an absentee ballot for the upcoming elections! This usually must be done in advance. Do it now!
www.fvap.gov

Check out the second chapter of @crisottocento.bsky.social's PhD thesis, published now in J Exp Biol journals.biologists.com/jeb/article-...
Shout out to coauthors E. Burdfield-Steel, J. Mappes, O. Nokelainen, M. Furlanetto & @sandrawinters.bsky.social