Centre for the Advanced Study of Collective Behaviour

Over the moon to be featured on NPR’s The Wild with Chris Morgan 🎧✨🌍🎶

From turning animal & plant data into music—🐢 🐜 🐦 🌿 —to educational programs

I also share how music + nature supported me through my cancer survivorship journey 🎻🏥

🎧👇 www.kuow.org/stories/let-...

🔴 LIVE roundtable: AI, research integrity, and productivity

feb 25 @ 16:00 CET

can we do rigorous, transparent research while using AI tools?
4 top methodologists discuss:
→ lena janys
→ david garcia
→ peter selb
→ @evathomann.bsky.social

hybrid event (@uni-konstanz.de + livestream)

Go Michael, have a great time today! 👨‍🏫💪

📢ANTS 2026 Call for Late Breaking Results & Fresh Perspectives (posters & demos)

Early-bird registration ends this Friday (20 Feb)

We welcome interdisciplinary work on collective behaviour and self-organised systems, across science, engineering, arts, and humanities.

Details at ants2026.org

Multi panel figure from a scientific manuscript. Panel A shows a map of the globe with sampling sites for different isolates of C. elegans indicated. Panel B shows two plots demonstrating variation in different aspects of a collective aggregation behavior among globally collected strains. Two strains which greatly differ in the magnitude of aggregation are highlighted below the graphs, with circular plots showing the representative distribution of worms during experiments. The less aggregating strain has individuals dispersed across the field of view, the more aggregating has clumps of individuals gathered together.

New preprint from the Genes and Behavior group! @mpi-animalbehav.bsky.social @cbehav.bsky.social
Youn Jae Kang led this study on the evolution of a collective behavior in C. elegans. doi.org/qq3t

Cluster community at lunch break with poster session

CASCB members in the audience listening to Armin Bahl's talk

Genuinely delighted about this year’s CASCB Spring Retreat and energized to feel that, as a community, we are exactly where we want and need to be!
Huge thanks to all the incredible people, across academic stages, disciplines, and research-supporting roles, who made this retreat such a success!

Fruit fly larvae are more social than you think 🐛#UniKonstanz @cbehav.bsky.social researchers discovered that they change their behaviour depending on who’s around - and uncovered the mechanisms behind it. t1p.de/t76uj

Konstanz School of Collective Behavior 2026 is one of a kind school where students delve into state of the art research on collective behavior.
Apply here: www.exc.uni-konstanz.de/kscb/applica...
Deadline: March 15th, 2026
@cbehav.bsky.social @mpi-animalbehav.bsky.social @uni-konstanz.de

Another year, another outstanding award for our speaker Iain Couzin! Congratulations!

Excited to share my first PhD preprint! w/ Sören Kannegieser and @anna-stoeckl.bsky.social @insect-vision.bsky.social

We investigated how hawkmoths coordinate lateralized sensory and motor control for appendage guidance, revealing similar control principles to vertebrates doi.org/10.64898/202...

Congratulations, Ahmed! 💪

Gaze and behavior tracking in animal research: Granularity, automation, and technological choice Recent advances in tracking technologies have significantly improved data granularity and automation in the study of animal behavior and cognition. Ho…

Co-written this chapter on how technological innovations can lead to new insights, specifically for gaze tracking in non-human animals, check it out!

www.sciencedirect.com/science/chap...

Feel free to contact me for a pdf version 🤗

@cbehav.bsky.social

The first paper from the lab is now out in Science Advances: Multimodal social context modulates larval behavior in Drosophila
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
We find that fly larvae keep their distance to conspecifics in the absence of food, enjoy reading! @cbehav.bsky.social @uni-konstanz.de

Researchers from #UniKonstanz, @mpi-animalbehav.bsky.social and the University of Zurich have investigated how meerkats use vocal exchanges – rather than physical touch – to maintain social bonds and manage their complex group hierarchies. t1p.de/okuf3
Vlad Demartsev

🧪Before the day begins, meerkats share a unique ritual. After emerging from their burrows, they spend up to an hour "sunning" to warm up for the day. During this quiet time, they produce soft, tonal "sunning calls". Just standing, sunbathing, and calling. But why❓ #bioacoustics #meerkats #kalahari

www.exc.uni-konstanz.de/collective-b...

The next generation of disinformation may not look like copy-paste bots, but like coordinated AI swarms. A chorus of seemingly independent voices creates the illusion of consensus while spreading disinformation, warns #UniKonstanz researcher David Garcia Link: t1p.de/3vako
@science.org
@dgarcia.eu

#UniKonstanz @cbehav.bsky.social researchers studied how insect brains take in complex light stimuli and process them in parallel. Neuroethologists Anna Stöckl and Ronja Bigge are the first to have found evidence that information is processed in different layers of the lamina. Details: t1p.de/h15yj

Forschende der @uni-konstanz.de haben untersucht, wie Insektengehirne komplexe Lichtreize aufnehmen und parallel verarbeiten. Es könnte eine schichtweise Verarbeitung der Informationen in der Lamina stattfinden.
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Bild: © Elisabeth Böker/Universität Konstanz

Movebank

Help us improve Movebank: During 2026, we will undertake a major renewal of the Movebank system to build scalability and sustainability. What does Movebank mean for you? How could it better support your work? Your feedback will be highly appreciated! Survey: survey.academiccloud.de/f/221856?lan...

How sophisticated is vocal communication in rails? A team involving #UniKonstanz @cbehav.bsky.social biologists shows that pūkeko combine sound elements across two levels of organization into call sequences – a complexity previously unknown in non-vocal learners. t1p.de/lj6an

New paper from the lab, led by @ronjabigge.bsky.social, in collaboration with Kentaro Arikawa. We reconcile contrast and spatial processing functions of lamina monopolar cells by integrating 3D morphology, connectivity and neurophysiology in the hummingbird hawkmoth. tinyurl.com/mvnh3325
For more 👇

STbayes: An R package for creating, fitting and understanding Bayesian models of social transmission A critical consequence of joining social groups is the possibility of social transmission of information related to novel behaviours or resources. Network-based diffusion analysis (NBDA) has emerg...

🎉🍾 very excited to see this out before 2025 ends doi.org/10.1111/2041... with Will Hoppitt in @methodsinecoevol.bsky.social. This paper is an overview of our new R package STbayes, a user-friendly toolkit for performing Bayesian NBDA analyses. @cbehav.bsky.social @mpi-animalbehav.bsky.social

YouTube video by Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior Mathilde Delacoux | Collective vigilance in pigeons

How do pigeons balance the need to feed with the need to stay safe? IMPRS-QBEE student Mathilde Delacoux working with Fumihiro Kano, uses motion capture to study how information transfers through pigeon flocks.
@mpi-animalbehav.bsky.social

youtube.com/shorts/w5p_Z...

In our last seminar talk of the year, we're delighted to welcome Davide Scaramuzza (University of Zurich) to discover how combining model-based approaches, machine learning, & low-latency sensors is pushing the limits of agility, robustness, and safety in autonomous systems!
📍Today Zt702 & online

Attending #ASABWinter2025 this coming week? Feel free to stop by my poster and check out how we used novel visual field estimations for freely-flying hawkmoths to investigate lateralized sensorimotor control! Excited to share the results from the past two years of work 🦋👁️👅🦾 and happy to chat!

#UniKonstanz researchers around Clemens Bechinger (@cbehav.bsky.social) and from @fz-juelich.de realize tunable “swarmalators”. These tiny, self-propelled particles both move in space and synchronize in time. Like living organisms, they influence one another with their motion + rhythm. t1p.de/eck7p

🎉 Youn Jae Kang 🎓 successfully defended her thesis "Evolutionary deconstruction of C.elegans aggregation behaviour: environmental and genetic correlates of aggregation behaviour and its individual and interaction components", 🪱supervised by Serena Ding - congratulations!🥂

YouTube video by Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior Maya Dagher | Collective behavior

Is there a common principle for animal decision-making? IMPRS-QBEE student Maya Dagher working with @icouzin.bsky.social uses theory and simulations to explore how the ring attractor model can predict animal decision making
@mpi-animalbehav.bsky.social

youtube.com/shorts/1rMZY...

Congratulations, Michael, for this exciting publication.
It's open access, so everyone can have a read! 👏💪🦜