Pietro Pollo

🌙🔊 How do we perceive light and noise pollution?
Your experience matters! ✨

Take part in this survey 👉 app.onlinesurveys.jisc.ac.uk/s/salford/pl...

Your input will help better understand these growing problems. The survey is part of the European project PLAN-B.

#lightpollution #noisepollution

Statistical performance of animal cognition meta-analyses at the primary-study and meta-analysis levels. (a) Statistical power: Median power to detect the (true or bias-corrected) meta-analytic effect size; darker red bars indicate lower power. (b) Type M error: Median exaggeration ratio between estimated and true effect sizes; darker blue indicates stronger overestimation (values > 20 shown as “20+”). (c) Type S error: Median probability of obtaining a significant effect in the wrong direction; darker yellow-green indicates higher Type S error. Violin plots above each panel summarise distributions across meta-analyses. Each point represents one meta-analysis (matching a row in the bar plots), and the horizontal line denotes the overall mean.

"The statistical fragility of animal cognition findings: a meta-meta-analytic reappraisal"
doi.org/10.32942/X2Z...

Do you get confused when reading meta-analyses? Our new paper offers a practical guide to help researchers understand, interpret, and use them properly. We also show that the insights meta-analyses provide are often overlooked by those who cite them.

UPDATE: I saw it happen! At the Birds Canada research station at the tip of Long Point I watched an expert ever-so-gently and carefully put one of these tiny tags on a monarch. Let me walk you through the steps (1/4)

Sexual selection in wild populations of seed bugs: the role of size in pre-copulatory mate choice by females and males Abstract. Although sexual selection is a well-established part of evolutionary biology, controversies remain about the roles of males and females. For inst

Size does matter for mating success in two species of seed bugs in the wild. #sexualselection #lygaeidae #mating #naturalselection #malematechoice #sicily

doi.org/10.1093/jeb/...

@opheliasfritsch.bsky.social and Shuker

Absolutely nobody asked for this but I reformatted my animal yeetability thread into printable poster & zine files.

Introducing, the "Pocket Guide to Responsible & Sustainable Animal YEETING" featuring a revamped rating system. Download links below.

I wish there were more posts like this

Insect populations are rapidly declining even in relatively undisturbed landscapes, raising concerns about the health of ecosystems that depend on them.

esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Following funnel-web spiders — amazing work by Caitlin Creak:

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

Study initially by @braxtonjones.bsky.social, Danilo Harms and I (funded by NatGeo and AusGeo), taken up by Caitlin with Russell Bonduriansky and Mike Kasumovic. Congrats all, especially Caitlin! :)

Congrats, Fabian!

Spider Biology This attractive book covers all aspects of spider biology and will appeal to general readers interested in spiders as well as specialists (arachnologists).

🕷️#Arachnews alert! 🦂
New Foelix (the definitive reference for general spider biology, a must-have for every arachnologist & arachnophile) just dropped.

Now called Spider Biology, this is an completely rewritten & updated version of the Biology of Spiders (2011).
link.springer.com/book/10.1007...

YouTube video by Sabine Hossenfelder Scientific research has big problems, and it's getting worse

Sabine Hossenfelder: "Scientific research is broken. This has been going on for decades, and the situation is not improving. It's getting worse."
youtu.be/9yPy3DeMUyI?...

The cover of Bayesian Data Analysis book

The cover of Regression and Other Stories book

The cover of Active Statistics book

All three books I've co-authored are freely available online for non-commercial use:

- #Bayesian Data Analysis, 3rd ed (aka BDA3) at stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/book/

- #Regression and Other Stories at avehtari.github.io/ROS-Examples/

- Active Statistics at avehtari.github.io/ActiveStatis...

Our study, conducted with great care and attention, is out! It went through a meticulous community peer-review process under open science practices, and I’m proud to be part of it. The results may not be what we hoped for, but they are what we need to move toward real inclusivity in science. 💜

A black insect with a long curved appendage coming out of it at the top rests on a leaf.

No one does fancy appendages quite like treehoppers. Here's a particularly spectacular one, likely in the Genus Hypsauchenia.

📷 sukal on iNaturalist
📍 Thailand
🔗: www.inaturalist.org/observations...
#ObservationOfTheDay

The behavioural research literature is concentrated on certain taxa. Last chance to help us find out why by participating in a survey that takes only 5-10 min: unsw.au1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_.... Participation is voluntary and there are no negative consequences for choosing not to participate!

Photograph of a metallic blue/green beetle with a very spider-like body, a huge fake "abdomen" that is swollen and dented with even pits over its bulbous surface. It is otherwise ant-like, standing on a pure white stylized background.

The thing about entomology is, there are always weirder bugs than anything you could imagine on your own.

Here's Cysteodemus wislizeni, a blister beetle from west Texas.

"Ungeneralizable generalizations? A meta-meta-analysis of the influence of taxonomic bias on the study of behavior." - doi.org/10.32942/X2X...

Graph of R&D spending (% of GDP) versus Year, with coloured dots joined by lines showing different countries (shown in the key at the bottom of the graph) taken from Nathan Garland's article here: https://nathangarland.substack.com/p/productivity-reform-starts-with-public

Black text on white background. List of "concrete and tangible actions" for increasing productivity. Screenshot from Nathan Garland's article: https://nathangarland.substack.com/p/productivity-reform-starts-with-public

"Productivity reform starts with public science" by Nathan Garland @n8sci.bsky.social has some worthy suggestions for improving productivity.

In news we all know – but the Government seems to like ignoring – it'll help to fund more basic science research!

nathangarland.substack.com/p/productivi...

Are you a behavioural researcher?

Participate this survey from the University of New South Wales.
The research aims to learn more about why researchers choose organisms for research.

For more information, please contact p.pollo@unsw.edu.au
#science #ecology
unsw.au1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...

Brazil and Portugal should be green too

How a discovery in Yellowstone National Park led to the development of PCR - Richmond Scientific A discovery in Yellowstone National Park led to the development of PCR, the gold-standard COVID-19 tests used to fight the global pandemic.

Reminder: Nobel-prize winning PCR (1983), used in basically all genetic tech today, was only possible because of extremophile bacterium discovered in 1964 in Yellowstone funded by a small ~$80k NSF grant with no obvious application at the time. #science 🧪
www.richmondscientific.com/how-a-discov...

Illustration of two people, one holding a large pencil, the other walking along a path of diverging arrows. Hedline is "Rules all PIs should follow."

#NextGenSci asked young scientists to write a rule that all principal investigators should be required to follow to improve the experience of young scientists in their lab.

Check out their answers on #NationalHigherEducationDay: scim.ag/45zsFEr

Diagram showing the reporting and analysis inclusion of study subjects sex and life stage information in meta-analytical studies, separated by research aim.

Systematic mapping and bibliometric analysis of meta-analyses on animal cognition doi.org/10.32942/X2X...

Help us find out the potential factors behind the choice of research organisms by ethologists and behavioural ecologists by participating in this quick survey (5-10 min): tinyurl.com/xbnu254h. Participation is voluntary and there are no negative consequences for choosing not to participate!

Reliability of meta-analyses in ecology and evolution: (mostly) good news from a case study on sexual signals | Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences Meta-analyses are powerful synthesis tools that are popular in ecology and evolution owing to the rapidly growing literature of this field. Although the usefulness of meta-analyses depends on their reliability, such as the precision of individual and mean ...

Massive piece of work by @pietropollo.bsky.social and colleagues!

Really encouraging paper showing that many EcoEvo meta-analyses are largely reproducible and replicable!

doi.org/10.1098/rspb...

Thanks for sharing @eivimeycook.bsky.social 😄

Picture of male Oecanthus henryi

Picture of male Oecanthus henryi

Since we've moved platforms, I thought I'd make a new explainer thread for our (Aamir Sadiq, @vishuguttal.bsky.social, Rohini Balakrishnan, and I) recent paper on tree crickets.

Meet Oecanthus henryi. Like in many cricket species, O. henryi males call to attract mates.

#science #evobio 🌍 🧬

Cat with glasses and bow tie. Caption of course He is risen. Helium is lighter than air

Happy Easter from Chemistry Cat 🧪

Legs for days!