Amiyaal Ilany

Two house mice interacting in an enclosure

🎉 What a way to end the year!

Very excited to see our new paper on 🐭 innovation and mate choice out in @currentbiology.bsky.social!

doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2025.11.077

With the amazing @fragdarm.bsky.social, @valmazza.bsky.social & Anja Guenther

I learned a lot from this paper, showing that for most microbes, humans host only one strain in their gut. This implies that we can track strains and their transmission between hosts. I'm wondering if it varies among host species.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

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

Our newest research in @currentbiology.bsky.social:

www.cell.com/current-biol...

We find dominant baboons have more interrupted and less rest at night.

Author list and story in comments below :-)

Interested in how life history may shape the gut microbiome of a wild mammal? Keen on getting to work with an iconic long-term study system in Scotland?

Check out this PhD opportunity with me, Josephine Pemberton and @gfalbery.bsky.social

Reach out to chat more!

www.findaphd.com/phds/project...

Jumping spiders can recognise one another. This ability to learn, remember and represent images is quite surprising for such a tiny-brained animal!
buff.ly/dCkwPr0

The missing heritability question is now (mostly) answered Not with a bang but with a whimper

I wrote a little bit about the "missing heritability" question and several recent studies that have brought it to a close. A short 🧵

Jolie, an adult female chimpanzee of the Ngogo community in Kibale National Park, Uganda, with sleeping infant son, Zawinul. CREDIT: Kevin Langergraber

After the Ngogo chimpanzee group killed 21 members of neighboring groups and expanded their territory by 22%, female birth rates more than doubled and infant survival increased sharply—showing clear fitness benefits from intergroup killing. In PNAS: https://ow.ly/TKmf50XuPjY

Meerkat pups in the Kalahari, South Africa

Rhesus macaques in Cayo Santiago

Dwarf mongoose staring at a camera, South Africa.

📢Two fully-funded #PhD opportunities to work with us:

Topic: Social monitoring & manipulation

UK-domiciled black-heritage scheme: tinyurl.com/aja54nr6

NERC DLTP: tinyurl.com/4jfy47pp

Cosupervisors: #PatrickKennedy @ljnbrent.bsky.social
@bristolbiosci.bsky.social
#bioacoustics #mammals #fieldwork

Each dyad (a, b) moves through four discrete states over time, represented by coloured circles. The dyad remains in a given state for a certain duration, or "holding time", before transitioning to a new state according to state-specific transition probabilities, indicated by arrows showing all possible (non-zero) transitions. Paintings by Sofia M. Pereira & Judith von Nordheim.

New paper!

We propose a framework to empirically study animal social relationships by modelling social network (SN) data as time-series—that is, without the need to aggregate them over time.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

🚨STOP SCROLLING, IT’S AN EMERGENCY BROADCAST📣 This message will self-destruct in 10…9…8…7…⏰ …now that I have your attention:
🧪Our new paper on Alerting Components in animal vocalization is out in AnimBehav🎉
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
#AnimalBehaviour #Bioacoustics #Communication

Impact of animal socioecology on gut microbial communities: Insights from wild meerkats in the Kalahari Our study addresses critical gaps at the nexus of animal and microbial ecologies, adding much-needed empirical support to recent theoretical frameworks that have conceptualised gut microbiomes as bei...

‼️ Thrilled to share my first article on the Kalahari meerkats ‼️, in @animalecology.bsky.social! Group membership strongly influences gut microbiomes & especially the co-occurrence of beneficial bacteria, beyond animals' age or sex, disease status, or environmental exposure

doi.org/10.1111/1365...

Alerting components in animal vocalization Effective communication relies on signals that are detectable and informative, yet the structural acoustic properties supporting these qualities are n…

New paper, led by Vlad Demartsev:
Alerting components in animal vocalization
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

POSITIONS default description

I am looking for a postdoc to work in our long-term system of food-caching mountain chickadees in the Sierra Nevada mountains. The expected start is April 2026. Please see details here: chickadeecognition.com/positions
If interested and qualified, please contact me directly (email on the website).

Exciting new work from former team members Eric Romero, Cwyn Solvi, Fei Peng and colleagues makes the cover of Science: affective contagion in bumblebees! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Excited to share our new paper on the #social #structure of Rwenzori #colobus multi-male, multi-female core units! We found 3 different patterns but close #male #relationships in all that were long lasting! Paper is behind a paywall but contact us if you want a pdf. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

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

Your Genes Are Simply Not Enough to Explain How Smart You Are Seven years ago, I took a bet with Charles Murray about whether we’d basically understand the genetics of intelligence by now.

In 2018, Charles Murray challenged me to a bet: "We will understand IQ genetically—I think most of the picture will have been filled in by 2025—there will still be blanks—but we’ll know basically what’s going on." It's now 2025, and I claim a win. I write about it in The Atlantic.

Trying to work from home with my kids around

Using spatially explicit individual-based modelling to evaluate the ecological feasibility of big cat reintroduction: the example of the Arabian leopard Large predators have steadily declined worldwide due to habitat fragmentation, human-wildlife conflict, prey depletion, and persecution. Conservation …

New paper, led by Luciano Atzeni:

Using spatially explicit individual-based modelling to evaluate the ecological feasibility of big cat reintroduction: the example of the Arabian leopard

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Call for Applications for the Azrieli International Postdoctoral Fellowship-2026-27 - The Azrieli Foundation

War is over, so here's a great fellowship to do a postdoc in Israel. Get in touch if interested:
azrielifoundation.org/azrieli-fell...

Analysis of communication and collective behavior in animal groups

⭐PhD position available!⭐
Come join us @imprs-qbee.bsky.social to study communication and collective behavior in animal groups! We're looking for someone excited to use computational approaches to tackle biological questions, using our full-group tracking datasets
imprs-qbee.mpg.de/121465/analy...

I'm v excited to be recruiting a PhD student to work on badger behaviour and ecology! Starting date is March 2026; see the ad here, or message me for more details: www.gregalbery.me/s/March-2026...

Amazing days at the Sinharaja rainforest, Sri Lanka, and saw a loris!

Learned use of an innate sound-meaning association in birds - Nature Ecology & Evolution Over 20 species of geographically and phylogenetically diverse bird species produce convergent whining vocalizations towards their respective brood parasites. Model presentation and playback experiments across multiple continents suggest that these learned calls provoke an innate response even among allopatric species.

This is an awe-inspiring and fascinating study that I thoroughly enjoyed reading. However, the overall framing in terms of "innate versus learned” is unnecessary. The innate versus acquired dichotomy is outdated and has been for a long time. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🌍🦋 Across 6 continents, 21 sites & 15,000 paper moths, we joined a worldwide experiment led by @wlallen.bsky.social & Iliana Medina, showing how ecological context shapes the evolution of animal colouration.

Proud to be part of this global team effort: doi.org/10.1126/scie...

Genetic and environmental sources of behavioral individuality: a test of the standard model Behavioral variation is typically assumed to arise from the combination and interaction of genetic and environmental variation. However, recent work with genetically identical individuals has found th...

New preprint out from the lab, including @rroyaute.bsky.social:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

In this we test what we refer to as the "standard model" of behavioral variation.

This was inspired by recent work identifying intra-genotypic variation as a major contributor to "individuality".
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Social network dynamics under experimental manipulations of predation risk and food abundance in wild rock hyraxes This study combines replicated experimental manipulation, social network analysis, network permutations and meta-analysis to disentangle active from spatially-induced changes in animal network struct...

New paper, led by Camille Bordes:
Social network dynamics under experimental manipulations of predation risk and food abundance in wild rock hyraxes

besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Social network dynamics under experimental manipulations of predation risk and food abundance in wild rock hyraxes This study combines replicated experimental manipulation, social network analysis, network permutations and meta-analysis to disentangle active from spatially-induced changes in animal network struct...

My bad:
besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

New paper, led by Camille Bordes:
Social network dynamics under experimental manipulations of predation risk and food abundance in wild rock hyraxes