@sharmisen.bsky.social
Behavioral ecologist // evolutionary anthropologist Interested in all things related to ~~social evolution~~ Postdoc @Northwestern studying behavior, sexual selection & microbiome of wild primates she/hers
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! 💪
Fascinating longitudinal study in @currentbiology.bsky.social by @alicebaniel.bsky.social @jbeehner.bsky.social and colleagues, providing evidence for deceptive fertility in a wild primate (gelada) 🧪
www.cell.com/current-biol...
Our #mentorshipmatching event is two days away now!! 📣
--> Sign up to be a mentor/mentee, join the @abcmicrogrants.bsky.social community!! 🐝🐝🐝
--> Share this with interested students and ECRs in your group!
--> Become a monthly donor to help us keep growing!
This is a fantastic opportunity!!
Sign up to be a @abcmicrogrants.bsky.social mentor today!
Share this with other mentees who will benefit from this program 🐝🐝🐝
Examples of some recent papers from graduate students in my group - a full list of recent papers and preprints can be found here (https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?hl=en&user=pTdxVdIAAAAJ) and profile of the group here: https://egioxford.web.ox.ac.uk/members
The annual Wytham Field Team Photo!
Celebrating a successful field season with great food & good company - May 2025
Front view of the Life & Mind Building, which opened in Oct 2025: The new home of Biology at Oxford
Interested in a PhD in ornithology? Funding available for projects at the interface of ecology, behaviour & evolution from Oct '26 working on long-term population studies of tits at Wytham, based in @biology.ox.ac.uk in the new Life & Mind Building in Oxford
www.findaphd.com/phds/project...
I've received an 'exclusive' invite to try Nature's new 'research assistant', which will burn down a forest to provide a 'summary of the paper' I'm reading and I have SUCH exciting news for them, that's called an 'abstract' and the actual authors already wrote it for me, no forest-burning required.
17.10.2025 14:10 — 👍 1939 🔁 477 💬 22 📌 21
Photo of Jane Goodall in the center, signing a book, with three women standing slightly hunched behind her. A very young Michelle is to the right, smiling.
As a primatologist, Jane Goodall was a huge inspiration to me. I admired the way she describes chimpanzee behavior with such detail and empathy, and she’s inspired so many people and advocated for chimpanzee conservation and welfare.
However, I'm dismayed at what her narrative leaves out (1/10)
A collage featuring some laboratory analyses, a schematic of the structure of DNA, a pocket watch in an elderly person's hand, and a family of wild meerkats.
🚨Fully-funded PhD opportunity in my group🚨
🧬How does parental ageing shape the next generation?🐾
Find out by studying meerkats!
🧪Epigenetic clocks
✨Bioinformatics
📊Long-term data
🌍Kalahari fieldwork
💡Big evolutionary questions
Get in touch or APPLY NOW
Please share!
www.uea.ac.uk/course/phd-d...
The Adaptive Relationships Framework illustrating how broad socioecological pressures shape the social solutions animals use to meet these challenges, and how these lead to social strategies and emergent structures that help them gain access to those solutions.
Social relationships are powerful predictors of fitness across social animals. But *why*?
In our new @cp-trendsecolevo.bsky.social paper, we outline testable predictions for why relationship quality and quantity adaptively vary across socio-ecological contexts.
tinyurl.com/55dnkeh7
Listen to @ecunningham96.bsky.social explain how this research project idea began - "From pathology to pleasure Reframing mechanistic studies on same-sex sexual behavior in primates"
15.10.2025 17:47 — 👍 11 🔁 8 💬 1 📌 3
14.10.2025 19:16 — 👍 3 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0
Are you studying animal sociality?
My (now published) first PhD chapter proposes a Bayesian + causal framework to infer the factors shaping the social relationships that animals form with one another.
journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...
Female capuchins sits on a branch, looking away from the camera. A young capuchin holds onto her back, looking at the camera. Photo: Nick Chapoy
🚨 New paper! 🚨
🐒 White-faced capuchins experience high rates of infanticide.
🐒 Infanticide is costly to female reproduction.
🐒 Do females exhibit the Bruce effect (termination of pregnancy) to reduce these costs?
🐒 Spoiler: Nope!
Read more ▶️ www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Image showing Hobson Lab logo (with parakeets, a social network, and R code), two Monk Parakeets, and several individually-marked parakeets with the text "Now recruiting PhD students!!"
**PhD POSITIONS** I am recruiting 1-2 PhD students to work on sociality and cognition in Monk Parakeets, starting Fall 2026. Full ad is here: hobsonresearch.com/index.php/20... (please help spread the word!)
23.09.2025 18:58 — 👍 58 🔁 83 💬 2 📌 3Folks attending @behaviour2025.bsky.social in the city of joy!! 📣 Visit poster #72 to catch @delphinedemoor.bsky.social & @stotra.bsky.social repping Team @abcmicrogrants.bsky.social
Learn more about our collective 🐝 🐝🐝
Our second round of microgrant applications will open on May 26th..
🥁New #ABCMicrogrants Funding Round!!🥁
More details to follow 🐝🐝🐝
Help us spread the word 🐝🐝🐝
Grad students: Free training and community-building event this week!! If you are working on anything involving individuals or populations from an ecology or evolutionary perspective (including modeling!) your work probably qualifies as "animal behavior" for our purposes. You can still register!
12.05.2025 16:40 — 👍 10 🔁 8 💬 2 📌 0Join us—mentee or mentor—for our next mentorship matching event! 🐝 We'll briefly introduce the ABC mentorship scheme & then there's plenty of time for mentees & mentors to get to know each other and decide if they'd like to start mentorship!
12.03.2025 15:50 — 👍 3 🔁 6 💬 0 📌 1
ABC distributed 8 microgrants already this year totaling 1295 GBP. Next round of application opens in May.
Contribute to ABC by making a one time donation or becoming a monthly backer!
We granted 8 microgrants totalling £1295! 🥳🥳🥳
Our next funding round will open for applications on 26th May. Thank you to all our donors for making this possible!! 🫶
Today my partner Miranda Cosman (not on bsky) found out that her NIH funded post-doc is being cut a year early. If you're looking for an absolutely amazing researcher to join your lab please let me know. Miranda works on skeletal phenotypic plasticity in response to exercise and diet (continued)...
11.02.2025 15:00 — 👍 4 🔁 1 💬 1 📌 0
So exciting to see MacaqueNet out into the world! 🤩
Learn about our global community & database centralizing standardized affiliative & agonistic data from 61 populations across 14 macaque species: doi/10.1111/1365...
Explore >600 networks & request data: macaquenet.github.io/database/
🧪 Check out our new paper in Sciences Advances! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
🐒 When a severe drought hit a population of wild monkeys in Costa Rica, individuals with a stronger stress response were more likely to survive
@jbeehner.bsky.social @irene-godoy.bsky.social
