Luke Rendell

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Picture of front cover of Theme Issue entitled "Transforming cultural evolution research and its application to global futures." The image on the front cover is of a Yao honey hunter in Mozambique holding retrieved honeycomb.

Today sees the publication of the Theme Issue featuring the CES Transformation Fund grant scheme. Enjoy! royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/issue/3...
@durhamdcerc.bsky.social @durhamanthropology.bsky.social @cultevolfunding.bsky.social @culturalevolsoc.bsky.social

i don't agree, but it's moot because they didn't even show that, they just found spectral peaks and then made a story which is wildly inconsistent with what we know about sperm whael sound production, so.... 🤷

Physically, yes that's what it is. But many animals sounds have this feature. What makes a vowel is not the sound but the phonological role in speech as the peak of a syllable - there's no definition that doesn't include the assumption it's a part of speech - no evidence for that role in whales!

Very cool to see this out, congratulations @alecburslem.bsky.social ! 🥳🐳🦑

Time to kick Ruzzia out of our politics. F**k Putin and his puppet Farage.

Yeah they did PR when they pre-printed it too, nothing's changed, just now they finally managed to get it into an allegedly peer reviewed journal - RIP that journal's reputation 🤣

Nice! I think it's always interesting to get a broader community response, thanks for sharing that...

Make Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence Again!

(Just a thought for journal editors, peer reviewers, journalists... 😉)

Don't just take my word for it ... @stephanielking.bsky.social and Denise Herzing provide insightful comments in this piece: www.sciencenews.org/article/ai-n...

No, they really haven't. Calling spectral peaks vowels is as inane as saying that because my washing up gloves are also yellow, they have the same nutritional content as a banana. Zero evidence of vowel-like function. It's pure clickbait, and a new low in irresponsible claims from this group 🙄🐳🦑🧪

Meet our plenary speaker Felicity Muth!

Assistant professor at the University of California Davis, her lab group are broadly interested in cognition, especially aspects of learning and memory that have a clear function in the natural world, focusing on captive and wild bumblebees.

me talking about SMRU research to a class of high school pupils

me standing in front of a life sized inflatable humpback whale called Hope

Great albeit exhausting fun representing @seamammalresearch.bsky.social on the Developing Young Workforce/Hope the Whale roadshow this with colleagues from WDC. 3 days, 3 schools, ~900 students ... aaaaand breath...🤣🐳

Inferring sperm whale (Physeter macrocephalus) sex and developmental stage using aerial photogrammetry Demographic data (i.e. sex and age) are fundamental for analyzing behaviour patterns and evaluating the reproductive potential of a population. However, determining these traits in the wild can be cha...

Super happy to share our new preprint on inferring Galapagos sperm whale sex and age-class using drone photogrammetry 🐳 📏 along with the wonderful @cmk-clarke.bsky.social, David Gaspard, and Hal Whitehead www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Super chuffed that @mikemwebster.bsky.social @ellengarland.bsky.social @nakedprimate.bsky.social and I had our course 'The question of culture in animals' among this list! 🐳🧪

Five members of "team fish" in our waders and woolly hats in front of the main rockpool, with a grey sky behind us.

Selfie on a sailboat

Three members of "team fish" wading into a large rockpool carrying rigs and floats for data collection, with a blue sky and fluffy white clouds

After almost a year(!!) of my PhD, I am excited to start my 3-month placement at @rothamsted.bsky.social 🌱 I shall miss this lovely group at St Andrews @animalsdoingstuff.bsky.social @mikemwebster.bsky.social @lrendell.bsky.social but I'm sure I'll be back to the sea before I know it! 🌊🐟🦀

File under "no s**t Sherlock" 🙄

And always with r/v Balaena a bit of pure sailing...⛵ #sailing

Prima facie evidence of lobtailing as a mobbing/gathering/social signal in this species 🤔🐋🦑🧪

Northern bottlenose are such a charming cetacean, vaguely absurd looking, but consistently showing a bold curiosity toward our vessel (and it's towed hydrophone!)

our operating area...

Me at the navigation/science station on r/v Balaena with galley also in view

Me in r/v Baleana's cockpit with sunset and field crew behind

Me and whole crew for 2 weeks in cockpit of r/v Balaena

Two fieldworkers on the bow of r/v Balaena can no longer take ID shorts because northern bottlenose whales are too close!

Better late than never but had such a great time last month helping Whitehead lab collect body condition and photo id on northern bottlenose whales in the Gully MPA - see 🧵 for cool whale videos!🐳🦑⛵

UK and EU at Zelenskyy’s side in Washington for meeting with Trump Emmanuel Macron, Friedrich Merz and others will aim to push back against ceding of Ukraine territory in ‘peace plan’

TACO Don is selling Ukraine down the river. Time for UK/EU and it's citizens to step up, good to see this effort! Please consider donating to Come Back Alive savelife.in.ua/en/donate-en...

www.theguardian.com/world/2025/a...

Spotting whales for the boat team at the lighthouse in the Southern Lagoon, New Caledonia 🐳 🎶 @solenederville.bsky.social @francae.bsky.social @seamammalresearch.bsky.social @uniofstandrews.bsky.social @entropie-marinelab.bsky.social

Sitting on the side of our research boat

Humpback whale fieldwork 2025: the season is well underway in the Southern Lagoon, New Caledonia @solenederville.bsky.social @seamammalresearch.bsky.social @uniofstandrews.bsky.social @entropie-marinelab.bsky.social @francae.bsky.social

Post-Doctoral Position on Cultural Adaptation in Forest Management The University of Maine seeks a post-doctoral researcher for a two-year project on human cultural adaptation in forest management, requiring a strong quantitative background and experience in modeling.

New 2 year post-doc position on cultural adaptation in complex environmental management.

From the figure legend: Figure 4. Conditional inference tree (Ctree) showing the partitioning effect of the presence of certain species (number of days per month) across 10 sites in the North Atlantic. Each Ctree node was restricted to a minimum sum of 60 weights and exceedance of a 0.95 test statistic. The size of the Ctree (depth) was not restricted, but the minimum sum of weights for each terminal node (numbered 1−9) was limited to 15. Each colour-coded site is labelled in the legend and ordered from north to south in order to latitude with a spectrum of colours from cool (blue) to warm (red). Beaked whale species represented all inner nodes except for one fourth tier node, which was sperm whales.

New paper
Exploring the biodiversity of cetacean communities along the western North Atlantic Ocean shelf-break
led by Samara Haver.

One finding:
"beaked whale species [were] the most significant driver of differences among cetacean communities"
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royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

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Dr Luke Rendel, a marine biologist at the University of St Andrews, calls this a 'poor cover for harassing animals in the wild'. Dr Rendle adds that the researchers also made 'no quantification of this behaviour and little attempt to do the hard work analyses that might give us some better insights as to why they do it.' Instead, Dr Rendle points out that this paper is more concerned with arguing that it is legitimate to keep orcas in captivity and observe them from tourist boats.

However, Dr Rendle argues that even genuine scientific observations can 'never be a justification for captivity for a species like this'.   Dr Rendle says: 'Make no mistake, this is a for-profit business trying to obscure the ethical issues with its existence by providing really quite lame studies like this.' 'If animals are in captivity for other reasons, it can be better to learn something from them while they are there, but it can never be a justification for captivity for a species like this – everything we learn about them in captivity tells us more and more that they never should be there.'

And for those understandbly reluctant to click on the Mail, here too (side note I do have a mildly nonstandard surname but two different misspellings in the same article is a new personal best 🤣 Rendell 1-0 Proofreaders) :

Orcas spotted SNOGGING for the first time - and they even use tongues A surprising new study now shows that orcas have a softer, possibly even romantic, side as they are caught kissing on film for the first time.

Orca snogging?! Wild tongues!? 🤭🙄 Tongue nibbling is a fascinating behaviour, but make no mistake, this paper is a sordid piece of propaganda attempting to sanitise two ethically dubious ways of economically exploiting these animals - spicy opinions here: www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/...