Delphine De Moor

📢We have a brilliant #PhD opportunity on collective animal behaviour across vertebrates! Deadline early 2026 so plenty of time to prepare, feel free to reach out for more info if you are interested in applying 👀

All details below👇

Shades of blue and red in a slice through an immuno stained brain showing some deliciously lovely looking mushroom body lobes - ripe for investigation during a funded PhD - and the central complex. Image credit: Dr Max Farnworth

🚨RA/PhD position available in evolutionary neurobiology 🚨

Working on a deep dive into circuit changes during mushroom body expansion in Heliconius butterflies @camzoology.bsky.social

- employment benefits
- 4 years funding
- 1000% fun

Deadline: 14/1/2026

Details:
www.cam.ac.uk/jobs/researc...

This #GivingTuesday please consider donating to @abcmicrogrants.bsky.social to support undergraduate students globally!! 🫶🗺️
Help us make #animalbehaviourresearch more inclusive 🐝🐝🐝
Sign up to be a monthly donor, or make a one time contribution using this link
opencollective.com/animal-behav...

🚨Two funded PhDs on the evolutionary ecology of antipredator colouration 🦋 with myself and Iliana Medina.

One in Swansea tinyurl.com/4thtbph6 deadline Jan 12th @crocus-dla.bsky.social

The other in Melbourne - deadline Jan 1st

Please share among potential students!

Come and join our lab! We have TWO fully funded PhD positions AND a paid field assistant opportunity in our Behavioral Ecology group @uni-goettingen.de & @primatenzentrum.bsky.social. Projects will be part of @rtg2906-curiosity.bsky.social & @sfb1528.bsky.social!!
Details in thread. Please re-post!

This season, we're especially grateful for the generous supporters who have helped us provide direct support to Animal Behavior Students. Your contributions are creating real opportunities for the next generation of researchers.

Happy Thanksgiving Week!! 🦃🦃🦃

Here at @abcmicrogrants.bsky.social we are giving thanks to all our wonderful donors 👛 🔃and stellar volunteers 🐝 🐝who keep Team ABC running throughout the year! 💪

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...

Chonker of a squirrel getting ready for winter, contemplating competing in the Fat Bear contest

Join me as 3-year #postdoc to study Demography of "Reproductive Ageing"

-menopause 🩸infertility 💉older fathers 👨‍👧 and more
-novel data sources from around the world
-population-level understanding of causes and consequences of reproductive ageing

+ Wonderful research community @mpidr.bsky.social

Interested in how life history may shape the gut microbiome of a wild mammal? Keen on getting to work with an iconic long-term study system in Scotland?

Check out this PhD opportunity with me, Josephine Pemberton and @gfalbery.bsky.social

Reach out to chat more!

www.findaphd.com/phds/project...

Evolutionary genetics meets ecological immunology: insights into the evolution of immune systems Immune genes show remarkably consistent evidence of selection, modification, and diversification across the tree of life. Parasites are a key force in…

Two weeks ago now @jennytung.bsky.social and I published a new review in Current Opinion in Genetics and Development, entitled “Evolutionary genetics meets ecological immunology: insights into the evolution of immune systems.” www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
A thread below...

It all began with a conversation at ISBE in Stockholm in 2022, and grew into a project that we all enjoyed working on together with @jbbrask.bsky.social, @mattjsilk.bsky.social , @ljnbrent.bsky.social, @jordanhart96.bsky.social & Dan Franks.

Thinking through and writing this paper was collaboration at its best 💛.

We outline five central challenges in comparing social networks, and use the Latent Layers Framework to explain why they arise and to suggest possible solutions — including the use of generative network models to estimate latent network layers (with uncertainty) more explicitly.

Differences in sampling biases and constraints across systems can create discrepancies between the networks being compared that reflect methodological, rather than biological, differences.

Keeping this in mind is important for any social network study, but becomes especially crucial in comparative analyses.

Two main reasons for this are:
• sampling biases, where some individuals or relationships are sampled more often than others
• constraints that prevent individuals from realising their preferences, including spatial structure or incompatible partner preferences

The networks we analyse therefore often do not directly—or exclusively—correspond to the biological phenomena of interest.

These observed networks are just a sample of the complete, or realised, networks, themselves a partial realisation of individuals’ social preferences.

Yet the questions we ask usually concern these two latent (not directly measurable) network layers.

When we study social interactions and the emergent networks, we usually analyse the observed social network: those interactions that we recorded during our observations.

Excited to introduce the Latent Layers Framework – now out in @behavecol.bsky.social – to help think through when and why network differences confound inference in (comparative) social network analysis! 🧵

tinyurl.com/3k3yahwy

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...

Not all sexual swellings signal fertility. Some signal strategy. In our new Current Biology paper, we show how gelada females “fake it” during male takeovers—and why it works.
authors.elsevier.com/a/1m7%7E93QW...

Join us! 🧬🪰🎉🔬

We are currently advertising two #PhD projects to study the #evolution, #development and #genomics of sexual traits in stalk-eyed flies.

Deadline for applying is Wednesday, January 7, 2026. Get in touch for more info!

Funded PhD NERC GW4+ DLTP - Social monitoring and manipulation of cooperative exchanges at University of Bristol on FindAPhD.com PhD Project - Funded PhD NERC GW4+ DLTP - Social monitoring and manipulation of cooperative exchanges at University of Bristol, listed on FindAPhD.com

Apply now for a NERC-funded PhD position with @andyradford.bsky.social & Patrick Kennedy at @bristolbiosci.bsky.social (with me as friendly 2nd supervisor down the road in @crab-exeter.bsky.social). Network cognition, cooperation, competition...what's not to like?
www.findaphd.com/phds/project...

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...

With #eseb2025 coming to a close, it is time to start making plans for 2026. Interested in the interface of evolution 🧬 and ecology 🌳? Come to our #ExE conference hosted by @uniexecec.bsky.social in beautiful #Cornwall. Leave your email address at tinyurl.com/EvolxEcol to join our mailing list!

Playing dice with behavior: drivers of stochastic individuality Animal behavior is often viewed as stemming from predictable genetic and environmental factors. However, despite our best attempts to control genetic …

Our new paper offers an explanation for the universal law that "under carefully controlled conditions.... an animal behaves as it damn well pleases." We explore how stochastic mechanisms may play an underappreciated role in generating individuality. (1/7 🧵)

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

1/13 New paper out! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Historical records across thousands of women showed that mothers with more children had shorter lifespans during a famine, fitting an evolutionary explanation for why we age
@hannahdugdale.bsky.social
@lummaalab.bsky.social
@erikpostma.bsky.social

I have some brilliant news to share! I recently received a DFG-funded Emmy Noether 6-year grant to establish my own group in Germany. I will soon be looking for a PhD student and a research assistant to join the team and investigate how the balance of power is maintained in animal societies.