Cedric van den Berg

😍 hardcore #colsci !

Wood tiger moth on leaf. Photo: Juhani Maamela.

Funded PhD position available 🎉 Come and work with me in Helsinki to uncover the pathways producing colourful tiger moth wings. Lots of options for genomics, CRISPR, fieldwork, behaviour experiments… Email with questions! jobs.helsinki.fi/job/Helsinki...

Deadline for submitting an abstract to give a talk or poster is this Friday!

new paper, led by Lin Yan from the Elias Lab at UCB

Latent preference for red ornamentation drives interspecific mating in nascent jumping spider species (Habronattus americanus group, F. Salticidae)
Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

The SORTEE Guidelines for Data and Code Quality Control in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology This is a Preprint and has not been peer reviewed. This is version 1 of this Preprint.

Introducing "The SORTEE Guidelines for Data and Code Quality Control in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology"

The first standardised set of data editor guidelines. Led by SORTEE with input from numerous data editors across ecology and evolution.

🔗 doi.org/10.32942/X24...

🚨Our new paper is out NOW in @jexpbiol.bsky.social 👀 Here we show that cuttlefish use visual contrast cues to inform their 3D camouflage, but these contrast cues can derive from true background features as well as exposure to dynamic lighting patterns. 🦑🔆
🔗 doi.org/10.1242/jeb....

Very cool! Congrats, you're a machine Chris! =D

Mapping the adaptive landscape of Batesian mimicry using 3D-printed stimuli - Nature Birds have an excellent ability to learn to discriminate harmless insects from those that they mimic on the basis of subtle differences in appearance.

Why do imperfect mimics (such as many hoverflies) exist? We created 3D printed replicas of flies, wasps and our own custom intermediates and then "asked" various predators what they thought of our 3D stimuli. Read all about it here: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

For sea slugs, bright colours may warn off predators—but only in the daytime For sea slugs, bright colours may warn off predators—but only in the daytime.

Very honoured to have our research highlighted by this very well-written article by Weller & Rabosky. Thank you! 10/10, can recommend if you want a thorough take on what our latest paper is about: besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... #colsci

Made the cover! doi.org/10.1111/1365...

Nice one, ChatGPT 😂

www.empiricalimaging.com/2025/05/19/b... Bug fix: Memory overload due to failing to clean up after image processing.

#colsci

Diel activity correlates with colour pattern morphology of heterobranch sea slugs The authors show that daytime activity fundamentally shapes the appearance of prey animals to potential predators and that colour pattern phenotypes likely associated with visual signalling are predo....

It's out! Read about how to combine advanced animal vision modelling and colour pattern analysis with comparative phylogenetic methods in arguably some of the most incredible critters in the ocean: doi.org/10.1111/1365....
Amazing work with amazing people! #colsci #micaToolbox #AnimalEcology

Left: Using genome-wide association analyses, VanKuren and colleagues show that separate loci within the K locus control a white-yellow color switch and contribute to variation in male preference, respectively, in a polymorphic population of Heliconius cydno in Ecuador. The full geographical range of H. cydno is shown on the map in light blue. The approximate location of the color pattern gene Aristaless-1 is shown for reference; other genes (not shown) are also present in the K locus, including some that are differentially expressed during the development of visual processing regions of the insect brain. In this and other H. cydno populations, white-yellow wing coloration correlates with the proportion of inhibited UV-photoreceptors, suggesting a compelling mechanism for the evolution of visual preference. Right: Individual ommatidia in the butterfly eye are composed of multiple photoreceptors. Inter-photoreceptor synaptic connections are known to exist within the lamina, the upper layer of the optic lobe, itself the region of the insect brain responsible for initial visual processing.

Bright colors observed across the animal world are often used during mate choice. @dickmerrill.bsky.social explores a @plosbiology.org study of genetic & neural mechanisms contributing to evolution of visual mating decisions in Heliconius butterflies 🧪 Paper: plos.io/4iHQDRd Primer: plos.io/4ipW7QS

#colsci

'A Standardized Nomenclature for the
Rods and Cones of the Vertebrate
Retina' #colsci

www.preprints.org/manuscript/2...

BUG ALERT: Naive Bayes clustering in QCPA

When using Naive Bayes clustering in <v2.3, the standard deviations instead of the means are used for downstream colour pattern analysis. For details & fix, read here: www.empiricalimaging.com/2025/02/05/b... #colsci

Black margins are important for size discrimination - female green swordtails prefer larger males but preference is lost when black margins on tail are absent. Seems they can't judge which male is bigger without black margin! shorturl.at/6GKA2
@uniexecec.bsky.social @royalsocietypublishing.org

#colsci

The birth of fruit fly's central nervous system imaged with multicolor #adaptive #lightsheet microscopy. The microscope self-aligns to a signal that appears during imaging.

www.nature.com/articles/nbt...

Some great PhD opportunities for 2025 in our fab department @uniexecec.bsky.social in beautiful Cornwall:

1) How does pollution impact behavioural evolution? Project with @ali--wilson.bsky.social spans behaviour, genetics and ecotox, working with cherry shrimp. More info: tinyurl.com/yvthn7xn

Ecology-Evolution scientific societies on Bluesky:

ESEB: @eseb.bsky.social
SSE: @sse-evolution.bsky.social
ASN: @asn-amnat.bsky.social
SMBE: @official-smbe.bsky.social
BES: @britishecolsoc.bsky.social
CSEE-SCEE: @csee-scee.bsky.social
and joining us today, welcome!:
SFE2: @sfecologie.bsky.social

Blueksy Mentions are now in Altmetric. It's been 84 years meme #AcademicSky #HigherEd #MedSky #HMSky #Altmetrics #Medlibs #Metascience

BLUESKY MEGA-THREAD

Altmetric is thrilled and also LITERALLY RELIEVED to officially announce:

We are now tracking research attention as it happens on Bluesky!

We have been picking up posts on the site since late Oct.

Our team is on Bluesky all day answering questions.

Let's get into it!

Help us understand how conspicuous butterflies are by playing this game!

mferickson.github.io/findbutterfly/

Still finding it hard to reconnect with everyone from Twitter (X) so here’s an attempt at finding all animal behaviourists, ethologists, behavioural ecologists etc, working with animal behaviour. Just pop a comment and I’ll add you to the list - let’s reconnect 😃
#appliedethology
go.bsky.app/8oJ3A8E

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A tiger squid (Sepioteuthis lessoniana) is showing off its iridescent beauty during our recent bit of fieldwork in #Australia #MoretonBay. Gotta love #cephalopods ! 🦑🌊🌈

@micatoolbox.bsky.social is a thing now!

#colsci