Martin Minarik

Another good Thrush migration night over Cambridge last night! Overall flight call counts comparable with 17 October, but a nice species composition shift over the few weeks, with Song Thrush having peaked and now outnumbered by Blackbird.

#nocmig #BirdTrack #CambridgeshireBirding #UKBirding

I also love they've now got the second language abstracts option! Meanwhile, some other unspecified publishers using a combination of multiple fonts to spell my surname (Minařík) correctly throughout our paper 😂

Hi, thanks! I'd love to join if you can add me 😊 If you take hobbyist nocmiggers, that is. I'm more into fish electroreception during the day 🙂

An impressive influx of Thrushes on the night of 12 October! After nights of birds just slowly trickling in, it all kicked off with 442 Redwing and 283 Song Thrush calls over Cambridge, plus some Wigeon, Moorhen, and a Common Sandpiper.

#nocmig #BirdTrack #CambridgeshireBirding #UKBirding

The call example also (in fact, mainly) including Chiffchaff also doesn't help 😅

The sound example they provide here is a bit confusing. There's a Chiffchaff calling in it, too - in fact, the first two sharp calls are Chiffchaff, only the third is the Yellow-browed Warbler.

My favourite figure from our new paper on lateral line development in Sterlet sturgeon (doi.org/10.7554/eLif...). In this one, we use targeted gene knockout and show that in (mosaic) absence of FoxG1, ectopic electroreceptors develop instead of mechanosensory hair cells!

#fishsci #evo-devo #CRISPR

Atoh1 is required for the formation of lateral line electroreceptors and hair cells, whereas FoxG1 represses an electrosensory fate Targeting Atoh1 for CRISPR/Cas9-mediated mutagenesis in sturgeon results in missing electroreceptors as well as mechanosensory hair cells, supporting conserved developmental mechanisms, whereas ectopi...

The full version of our CRISPR paper on Sterlet lateral line just got published, showing the conserved role of Atoh1 in electroreceptor & hair cell development, and FoxG1 promoting mechanosensory but repressing electrosensory fate!

doi.org/10.7554/eLif...

#sturgeon #fishsci #ancientfish #evo-devo

Interestingly, while Sturgeons cannot swim backwards, they seem to be able to speak Spanish backwards 😅

That sounds great, thanks! Will have a look!

Bike twitching should be the only acceptable form of twitching! 😂 Lovely bird!

Thanks! Might give it a go then, but at this stage I still prefer improving my ID skills by manually raking through all the recordings 😃 Will need those later to be able to assess which classifier works best for me anyway, and how reliable they are 🤷🏻‍♂️

Thanks! No, slowly working through it, the old-fashioned way. Tried BTO Acoustic Pipeline, but seemed to be missing quite a lot of the faint calls, and misidentifying some loud ones (Wigeon/Oystercatcher being repeatedly suggested for what was a resident Little Owl). May give it another go, though.

Don't get too excited about the landfowl NFCs. The first one is a Quail, yay! But the other two are just Pheasants. Nocturnal migration? No. Nocturnal flight call? Yes, if a few meters worth of escape flight after being flushed by a fox, or something, counts :)

Maybe just for better readability, here's the same data split by major bird taxa.

Waders are more evenly distributed throughout the year. This will a nice one to plot by species at some later point. Same with rallids, in fact. Anyway, back to IDing now, I guess 😂

Overwhelming majority of the autumnal songbird flight calls are Redwing. They clearly cluster into nights with lots of movement. The concentration of rallid calls (Moorhen, Coot, Water Rail) into spring months is also nice 😊

Avoiding the important steps in processing my #nocmig data (IDing a vast backlog of nocturnal flight calls from 2020-2023, and organising data from 2023 onwards), I tried to plot a subset of the calls I had already processed. A nice glimpse of what's to follow though 😊

Interesting! I would have thought they'd rely on electroreception from early on, considering their head is already practically covered with ampullae of Lorenzini at the onset of feeding (doi.org/10.7554/eLif...).

Opposing roles for Bmp signalling during the development of electrosensory lateral line organs In sturgeon, fewer electrosensory organs form after targeting Bmp5 for CRISPR/Cas9-mediated mutagenesis, whereas more form after chemically blocking all Bmp signalling shortly before their primordia e...

Another bit of insight into electroreceptor development in sturgeons by the Baker lab, the full version of Alex Campbell's paper is now available on eLife.

elifesciences.org/articles/99798

Meanwhile, Redwing counts indicate these winter thrushes are already leaving East Anglia for Scandinavia, while Moorhens and Coots will be ramping up their territorial flights with the coming spring. Good to hear a Barn Owl above our village too, along with the usual Tawny.

Here's a screenshot of a spectrogram of the Stone-curlew as shown in Audacity.

Recorded some migrating bird calls near Cambridge on Saturday night, and what a lovely surprise to hear a Stone-curlew amongst them! Same day RSPB posted a #SpringArrivalSpotlight about this rare bird on Bluesky 🙂 What a timing!

After you posted this, a Stone-curlew flew over our Cambridge garden the following night 😊

Common Frogs going at it during the sunny spell this weekend. Video sped up 5x, sound is in original speed to appreciate the impressive chorus of croaks. #frogspawn

Common Frogs taking the most of the UK's lovely spring weather this weekend.

Being used to Nothern Pintails staying so far out on open water that they usually occupy just a few dozen pixels on my desperate photo attempts, this one was quite a nice surprise on our brief stopover on Dernford reservoir near Stapleford, Cambs today 😊

Celebrating the #WorldWetlandsDay with a visit to WWT Welney today 😊

"at a distance of 100 cm in Cambridge tap water, signals of approximately 30 μV were observed."

🔌🐟 Time to pour myself a glass of the stuff, and gulp proudly on the medium in which the electric field of Gymnarchus was first characterised by H. W. Lissmann in 1951 😊

www.nature.com/articles/167...

Happy 2025 everyone! The attached New Year's card features some of my wildlife encounters from last year. My favourite amongst them is a lizard, Algerian Psammodromus, unusual amongst European species by its ability to produce audible distress calls 📣🦎 Also stunning to look at.