Soay Sheep Project

🔭🐑 Our summer field team have been busy beavering away and have completed their 10 censuses of the village bay population (picured). Over ten days a team of three will go out and count all the sheep in this area, tagged and untagged, so we know who is where and who they are grouping with.

T-helper cell responses in wild Soay sheep are repeatable, positively correlated, and linked to resistance against helminths and coccidia, challenging assumptions about Th1/Th2 trade-offs in natural settings.

📖 Read more: https://bit.ly/3GCm0PN

#VeterinaryImmunology

A blue test tube rack filled with numbered tubes. Next to it is a pipette and papers.

💻🐑 Update! Back on the mainland our team at @sheffielduni.bsky.social have been beavering away and have finished extracting DNA and aligning over 1000 whole sheep genomes as part of an exciting new project. Keep an eye out for more as the work progresses.

🔭🐑 Check it out! With the lambing team back on the mainland have a look at the stats for the arrival of the Echo Orange cohort of 2025!

.....and follow along with some of the authors here @erinsiracusa.bsky.social @delphinedemoor.bsky.social @gfalbery.bsky.social @elliswiersma.bsky.social @mattjsilk.bsky.social

Environment dependent benefits of sociality in Soay sheep An individual’s social connections have strong effects on fitness. Despite this, there is pronounced among-individual variation in social behaviour. This variation may be maintained if different types...

🖨️🐑 Sneak Peak! A new sheepie pre-print is up on BioRXiv on the Environment dependent benefits of sociality in Soay Sheep. Check it out here doi.org/10.1101/2025... (1/2)

I wonder what way the wind is blowing today ?💨
#sheep #soaysheep

For the feral #sheep on the remote St Kilda islands of #Scotland, long-term success hinges on the first year of life, especially for males. Here are the interesting reasons why: www.pnas.org/post/journal...

#ecology #EvolutionaryEcology #SexualDimorphism #SexualSelection

🔭🐑 The first lambs have arrived, and spot on time from consort sightings in November! Soon village bay will be full of skipping lambs and frantic field workers....🏃‍♀️‍➡️

In sheep, long-term success hinges on the first year of life—especially for males To track lasting impacts in the animals, ecologists investigated weather, parasite load, birth weight and other early-life factors. Image credit: Martin Stoffel.

📰🐑 They found that early-life adversities, eg reduced food resources, harsh winters and low birth weight, can reduce a sheep's ability to reproduce successfully and disadvantaged males in particular. Read a summary by @pnas.org here: www.pnas.org/post/journal...

📰🐑New Paper! PhD researcher @lizziedrake.bsky.social and collaborators looked at how harsh environments in a Soay's first year can have lasting impacts on reproduction and lifespan, and how they differ for males and females.
Read it here: royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

🔭🐑 Saturday saw a big milestone for our field team who completed their 10th and final census of the trip and were rewarded with some glorious weather! Bring on the Lambs...

🔭🐑 Our lambing field season is underway! Last week our lambing team arrived and started out on their first big job of the trip, study area censusing. They will try and spot as many sheep as they can across 10 censuses over the next couple of weeks

📰🐑 We're on the cover! If you haven't already seen it, check out a piece about how our long term field research helps studying ageing in the wild.

Each year’s lambs get a new colour on a six year cycle, prefixed with a letter. Last year’s lambs were Yellow, starting off our “echo” series. Any sheep caught where we don’t know there age are given “unknown purple” tags. 🔭🐑

The combination of different horn shapes, colour morphs and sometimes white patches make every sheep unique to the keen eye. But when we are out censusing it’s much easier to tell them apart by their unique colour tag and number which can be spotted through the teloscope 🔭🐑

Sheepie News! A perspective piece in @natureaging.bsky.social highlights the importance of long term research and how St Kilda Soay sheep project provides a powerful model for understanding why ageing process varies under complex environmental conditions.
Check it out: doi.org/10.1038/s435...
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T-helper cell phenotypes are repeatable, positively correlated, and associated with helminth infection in wild Soay sheep AbstractBackground. T-helper (Th) cells co-ordinate immune responses to ensure that infections with diverse parasites are controlled effectively. Helminth

Sheepie News! A new paper led by researchers at @moredunfoundation.bsky.social shows that immune responses are consistent over time and predict worm infection levels in Soay Sheep. Check it out here: doi.org/10.1093/disc...
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There are also different horns, with the rams, or as we call them Tups, sporting wonderful curls. Ewe horns are thinner and some don't have any at all, called polled. The third horn type is scurred where horns are misshapen, taking on a variety of trajectories and sizes.

With the lambing season fast approaching, it's time to meet the sheep! Soay sheep come in four colour morphs or "flavours" indicating their body and belly colours: dark-wild, dark-self, light-wild, and light-self. The most common is the dark wild morph with a brown body and white belly.

We've arrived! The Soay Sheep project now has Bluesky 🦋 Follow along for "bleats" about all things sheep related, from field work to research output and everything in between
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Sheepies on the move! Tomorrow is our annual sheep meeting in Edinburgh bringing together researchers from across the country for all things Soay Sheep 💻🐑
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#SoaySheepProject #research #ecology

Rut Team 2024! Xavier, Rebecca, and Lucy have (just about) finished a four week trip to do our autumn data collection: censusing, behaviour, and vegetation sampling, as well as setting up some extra wind loggers for the winter 🔭🐏
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#fieldwork #stkilda #soaysheep #ecology

Every cloud has its sliver lining! Today the Rut team were supposed to be heading home but weather conditions have meant we get an extra day on St Kilda and some bonus data collection 🔭🐏
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#fieldwork #research #stkilda #soaysheep #ecology

What I see vs what the scope sees.
The unsung hero of our field work, our telescopes help us spot all of our study animals and read their tags while not having to get too close to disturb them. This chap is DO004 🔭🐏
#stkilda #soaysheep #ecology #fieldwork #seenature

What a difference a couple of days can make! The rut team this trip have really had it all from sun to snow

So, in the final hour of my final day in my 4th decade of running the field side of the Soay sheep Project, I say thank you to the 100s of people I have worked with and thank you to all followers of this Twitter feed, I have thoroughly enjoyed welcoming you into this sheep fold.

I rarely use this for personal tweets but I would like people who have followed my Mother's Birthday tweets over the years to know that the day after I returned to mainland from my final lambing trip, she left us at 101 - knowing I was home safe at last.

Lamb races are just beginning as they discover the joy of life.

"Lambing Team 2024" plus ewe supervising her lamb being weighed.