Elodie Mandel-Briefer

Female superb fairywren in Australia.

Male superb fairywren in Australia.

📢NEW paper out NOW in @asab.org Animal Behaviour on how a novel #call changes subsequent responses to #alarms in #fairywrens

🌟CONGRATULATIONS #NatalieTegtman on #first paper from #PhD
👥With #RobMagrath

@bristolbiosci.bsky.social
#animalcommunication #birds #fieldwork #ECR

doi.org/10.1016/j.an...

Physiological health outcomes of dominance hierarchies in team-based contexts Find out more about this fully funded PhD studentship opportunity.

Fully funded PhD studentship on human dominance hierarchies and non-verbal behaviour, with lead Eithne Kavanagh. Join us at NTU! @eithnekavanagh.bsky.social

www.ntu.ac.uk/study-and-co...

New paper on dolphin motor synchrony led by master's student Sam Hill-Cousins with a fantastic team of co-authors @danaipapageorgiou.bsky.social @emmachereskin.bsky.social @researchdolphin.bsky.social 🐬🐬🐬: Male dolphins use synchrony to both maintain and strengthen their social bonds
rdcu.be/eQ543

#Job in #animalwelfare at University of Rhode Island!
Tenure-track Assistant Professor position specializing in Animal Health and Welfare. Focus on farm, companion, or zoo/captive wildlife. #academic @universityofri.bsky.social

jobs.uri.edu/postings/15931

Meerkat pups in the Kalahari, South Africa

Rhesus macaques in Cayo Santiago

Dwarf mongoose staring at a camera, South Africa.

📢Two fully-funded #PhD opportunities to work with us:

Topic: Social monitoring & manipulation

UK-domiciled black-heritage scheme: tinyurl.com/aja54nr6

NERC DLTP: tinyurl.com/4jfy47pp

Cosupervisors: #PatrickKennedy @ljnbrent.bsky.social
@bristolbiosci.bsky.social
#bioacoustics #mammals #fieldwork

PhD Fellow in Ecology/Ecosystem-Based Management (289259) | UiT The Arctic University of Norway Job title: PhD Fellow in Ecology/Ecosystem-Based Management (289259), Employer: UiT The Arctic University of Norway, Deadline: Sunday, December 7, 2025

We are hiring: #PhD fellow in Ecosystem-based management and marine connectivity🐋🧪🛰️

Want to work with tracking data from migratory species to identify ecological corridors and help inform biodiversity conservation priorities?
Apply by Dec 7th!
@bioprotectproject.bsky.social
tinyurl.com/ytfmfhfc

Burden of a failed error culture in biologging Driven by technological advancement and low cost, biologging has rapidly transformed the study of animal behaviour and ecology, providing unprecedente…

For your consideration, our paper about how we can build a better error culture around biologging is now out in Animal Behavio(u)r. A collaborative effort between researchers the veterinarians at @mpi-animalbehav.bsky.social

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

The British library is in crisis: why does nobody care? The widespread indifference to the British Library's crippling cyberattack demonstrates a perilous failure to value the knowledge infrastructure vital for national prosperity

I’ve written a piece on the curious lack of media and political interest in the issues faced by our national @britishlibrary.bsky.social. This is strange given we live in a world where ideas, knowledge and research are a long-term source of innovation and insight
www.cityam.com/the-british-...

Experimental evidence for delayed contingent cooperation among wild dwarf mongooses | PNAS Many animals participate in biological markets, with strong evidence existing for immediate cooperative trades. In particular, grooming is often ex...

#MongooseMonday is here again 🎉

Dwarf mongooses track what their groupmates are up to in the day using #vocal cues, altering their #grooming in the evening.

They reward helpful hounds (doi.org/10.1073/pnas...) & shun bullies (doi.org/10.7554/eLif...)

#bioacoustics #mammals #cooperation #conflict

These numbers are sickening. At a time when UK grant success rates are so low and uni libraries are making cuts, let's dare to dream about how we could change the system. What we could do with that money!

The earliest mature debate about animal consciousness occurred around 1900 and centred on the insects. We cover this rich history in this new article, as well as some more recent developments on the topic: royalsocietypublishing.org/.../10.../rs...

🚨 Wolves still need your voice! Congress is considering bills that could strip protections from gray wolves in 44 states. Losing these safeguards would leave wolves vulnerable to hunting and persecution.

Tell your Senators & Representative: oppose anti-wildlife riders. Take action: 👉 bit.ly/3VIlH9Z

Each dyad (a, b) moves through four discrete states over time, represented by coloured circles. The dyad remains in a given state for a certain duration, or "holding time", before transitioning to a new state according to state-specific transition probabilities, indicated by arrows showing all possible (non-zero) transitions. Paintings by Sofia M. Pereira & Judith von Nordheim.

New paper!

We propose a framework to empirically study animal social relationships by modelling social network (SN) data as time-series—that is, without the need to aggregate them over time.

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

Positions available - Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

Fully funded #PhDposition in Comparative Cultural Psychology @mpi-eva-leipzig.bsky.social.
We will use touchscreen experiments & eyetracking to study mental simulations in nonhuman apes & human children across different cultures.

All info here: www.eva.mpg.de/career/posit...
Please share / apply!🙏

Contact calls of zoo and wild southern white rhinoceroses do not differ acoustically Large mammal species are declining globally, and zoo populations may help support or re-establish wild populations through reinforcement or reintroduction. However, zoo environments differ from nat...

New paper out by PhD student @damaris-riedner.bsky.social, on southern white rhinoceroses, showing that zoo and wild populations do not sound too different 🦏🦏🦏 www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
@behaveco.bsky.social

A shared preference in humans and chimpanzees - NCCR Evolving Language A new study from researchers at the University of Neuchâtel, published in The Royal Society Open Science, compared the preference for prosocial behaviour, e.g. cooperation, in humans and chimpanzees. ...

📰Researchers from the UNINE compared the preference of humans and chimpanzees for individuals acting prosocial. The results uncover similarities that add to our knowledge on the origins of the extraordinary human collaborative and communicative abilities.

evolvinglanguage.ch/a-shared-pre...

Towards coexistence: human-animal co-construction of behaviour in shared spaces Humans and animals have always shared spaces, food and lives, but little research sheds light on this coexistence. In a new study, AIAS Fellow, cultural biologist Malene Friis Hansen and Professor Agu...

Read more about our new research on the importance of human-other animal co-construction of behavior for coexistence
aias.au.dk/events/show/...

Graphic showing the paper title “Monk parakeets ‘test the waters’ when forming new relationships” in the journal Biology Letters. Also features photos of the co-authors (Claire, Annemarie, Gerry, and Liz) as well as the issue cover photo of two marked monk parakeets from Claire’s work grooming each other. Also shown are some of the main plots of the paper showing how the parakeets escalate their behaviors from low risk/low investment (like proximity) to higher risk/higher investment interactions (like preening/grooming)

In an increasingly divided world, how do strangers become friends? Parakeets might have something to teach us! New paper on formation of affiliative relationships, led by Dr. Claire O’Connell doi.org/10.1098/rsbl...

Forskere på KU:Det er grotesk, at skandalebyggeri nu fører til fyringer Uddannelse | Politikens dækning af uddannelsesområdet med temaer som Studeliv og Højskoleliv samt klummer om livet som studerende, reformer og meget andet.

politiken.dk/danmark/udda...

🚨Who wants to work with Kalahari meerkats? A MSc project with @mathildemartin.bsky.social at the University of Zurich.
#bioacoustics 🧪

3 year postdoc funded by @ukri.org NERC on between-group cooperation in the Shark Bay dolphins is now live - please share widely 🙏 www.bristol.ac.uk/jobs/find/de...

Human-macaque Co-construction of Behaviours: Sharing Spaces, Sharing Food, Sharing Lives - International Journal of Primatology Humans and other-than-human-animals (animals) share spaces, food, and lives. This gives rise to possibilities of interspecific learning, social facilitation and interspecific communication, and the po...

Great new paper by @mfhansen.bsky.social and Agustin Fuentes on human-macaque co-existence link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Chimpanzees rationally revise their beliefs The selective revision of beliefs in light of new evidence has been considered one of the hallmarks of human-level rationality. However, tests of this ability in other species are lacking. We examined...

Are humans really the only rational animals? Our NEW PAPER 🎉 out in @science.org suggests otherwise! In a large collaboration led with my joint first author @hanna-schleihauf.bsky.social, we show that “Chimpanzees rationally revise their beliefs” 🧵

Calls for higher-welfare labelling legislation increase with new study A new study led by Professor Amitav Chakravarti, a leading marketing academic at the LSE, found 71% of customers would pay more if higher-rated meat was available in UK supermarkets

Misleading food labels are "unfair to consumers who simply don't have the information they need to avoid factory-farmed products"

Anthony Field, Head of our UK Team, speaks to @thegrocer.bsky.social. ⬇️

Factory farming wastes enough food to feed two billion people, shocking new report reveals New report shows two billion people could be fed each year if grain was grown for people, not animals.

An extra 16.5 million people in the UK, and two billion people globally, could be fed every year if governments prioritised food for people rather than feeding grain to factory-farmed animals.

Our new report outlines how.

#FoodNotFeed

Beef, pork, chicken: the world loves cheap meat. If people knew what really goes in it, that love affair would be over | Devi Sridhar Antibiotic use in farming is now rampant. How meat is produced in China may mean the drugs you need here won’t work, says Prof Devi Sridhar, chair of global public health at the University of Edinburg...

2025. Beef, pork, chicken: the world loves cheap meat. If people knew what really goes in it, that love affair would be over www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

If we end factory farming, we could free up land almost the size of Mexico. 🌎

For every 100 calories of grain fed to animals, just 3–25 calories of meat are produced.

That’s a huge waste.

It’s time to choose #FoodNotFeed. Find out more ➡️ bit.ly/3WB2QOF

Fredston Lab: Postdoctoral Scholar University of California, Santa Cruz is hiring. Apply now!

Postdoc fitting Bayesian spatial models to various streams of data on humpback whales with @afredston.bsky.social at Santa Cruz, CA
recruit.ucsc.edu/JPF02003

Feeding grain and soy to animals on intensive farms is inefficient. Feeding 100 calories of grain to farmed animals results in just 3-25 calories of meat. A huge number of calories are lost in the process.

DID YOU KNOW: For every 100 calories of grain fed to animals, only 3-25 calories of meat are produced.

We could feed another 2 billion people by choosing #FoodNotFeed. 🍲

Let’s fix our broken food system. Please sign the open letter to the UK Prime Minister ➡️ bit.ly/4hc5yDO