Tomer J. Czaczkes

Reposting for the Monday morning scrollers! Funded PhD opportunity with me @multipleye-lab.bsky.social @bristolbiosci.bsky.social - spiders, their eyes, and their babies under long- and short-term light pollution!

🚨🚨Job! 🚨🚨Permanent (75% time) job! We are a pretty awesome research group & seek a manager who deals with everything: personnel tasks, organizing retreats, preparing code for teaching / data structures for research... Fluency in German & English essential. stellenboerse.uni-mainz.de#/jgu/job/51527

Join us! Oxford is advertising an Associate Professorship in Animal Behaviour. my.corehr.com/pls/uoxrecru...

Trying to work from home with my kids around

📣 @asab.org grants BOOSTED! 📣

We've increased most of our research-related grants by 50%, effective from the next deadline of 1st Feb 2026.

Check out what we offer here:
www.asab.org/grant-overview

😍

Congrats to the winners of the best poster and best talk of the #gradmeeg25.
But all the contributions were really stunning!! @dzg-behaviour.bsky.social @denisebe.bsky.social

Illustrated trump cards featuring social insects such as ants, bees, wasps, and termites. Each card includes colourful artwork of an insect species along with stats and traits used for gameplay. The cards are part of the Social Insects Trump Cards game supporting the IUSSI widening participation and inclusion initiative

You like card games & social insects?

Then check out the amazing new Social Insects Trump cards game developed by @elvarobinson.bsky.social and her group.

It's the perfect 🐜🐝🪳-themed gift and you'll support the IUSSI widening participation & inclusion initiative: www.iussi-nweurope.org/edi

In celebration of World Octopus Day, we wanted to revisit one of our favorite cephalopod sightings, the glass octopus — Vitreledonella richardi filmed during a month-long #PhoenixIslandsCoral expedition in 2021.

A100 wegbassen: Demo auf der Autobahn am am 18.10.

📣 Am 18.10. eröffnen wir mit einer Rad-und Fußdemo auf der #A100 die Autobahn für ALLE!
📍 Estrel Hotel, S Sonnenallee
⏰ 14 Uhr
Egal ob zu Fuß, mit Rad, Skates oder anderem - Hauptsache ohne Auto!
🚲 🛼 🛴

Yes, I saw this!

🕷️PhD position: Homemakers; web building behaviour in New Zealand sheet-web spiders 🕷️

Please email Dr Leilani Walker - leilani.walker@aut.ac.nz

In early 2025, beaver activity in the Brdy Protected Landscape Area, Czech Republic, contributed to the restoration of a wetland ecosystem. A family of beavers constructed a series of dams that coincidentally accomplished environmental goals of the Czech government, which had delayed its proposed project since 2018 for bureaucratic and financial reasons. The beaver-built dams saved the Czech government approximately US$1.2 million,

imagine if a family of beavers randomly showed up right now and finished whatever thing you've been putting off

ecoevojobs.net 2025-26

UPDATE: The 2025-2026 list of faculty and postdoc positions in ecology and evolutionary biology is out! Be sure to check out this active and helpful community run resources! docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

An abbreviation (ABB) in a journal article (JA) or Grant Application (GA) is rarely worth the words it saves. Every ABB requires cognitive resources (CR) and at my age by the time I'm halfway through a JA or GA I no longer have the CR to remember what your ABB stood for.

Superefficient teamwork in weaver ants / Curr. Biol., Aug. 12, 2025 (Vol. 35, Issue 17) Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.

In humans, bigger teams often mean less effort per person — the #Ringelmann effect. Weaver #ants 🐜 flip the script: #teamwork makes them superefficient!

Video + paper out now in Current Biology!
@cellpress.bsky.social

tinyurl.com/44yrvp6m
tinyurl.com/3jnnevfn

A macro photo, vertical orientation, of an unusual moth cocoon, spun out of gold silk but in an oval-shaped, open-weave basket that looks like wire mesh. Part of a green leaf is out of focus in the background, and the top of the basket is attached to a white woven thread extending up out of frame. In the lower left half of the cocoon are a dozen or so small, gray, seed-like structures that are probably the cocoons of tiny parasitic wasps or flies, indicating they parasitized the moth pupa that originally made the mesh cocoon.

Urodid moth cocoon, Costa Rica. The basket hangs by a thread (possibly to discourage ants) and the structure may allow rain to drain and/or prevent mold. But it doesn't stop parasites - I think the seed-like ovals are cocoons of parasitic flies or wasps, indicating the moth pupa's likely fate. 🐙🌿

Much as I'd love to bring back Tomorrow's World, what we really need is Today's World, explaining the predatory nature of the tech industry, internet and phone scams, and online culture to people who aren't terminally online

Totally agree. One of those creations that just ooze quality. A few weaker tracks, but still.

The money saved from the various open access deals and publisher contracts should be enough to run their own professional Mega-Journal, I guess

I would see it more that every article has to be posted as a preprint on the funders server, and then the funders journals get "first dibs". If it's rejected by them, then authors get to send it elsewhere. Volume-wise, if the various arXives, PLOSs etc manage, it would surely be doable.

I completely agree, and have thought this for a while! Not ideal, but certainly a realistic goal, fitting the models we are used to, but diffusing a lot of issues. Not quite clear to me what the potential downsides are, compared to the current system.

A large, seemingly inflated black beetle with orange red markings on it. The abdomen is blown up and it has tiny hardened front wings which don’t cover its body.

A smaller individual of the same species which seems to have had the abdomen shrivel up some.

The large individual curled into the fetal position with an orange glob of its toxic blood secreted around its head to avoid predation and hopefully deter entomologists. Unfortunately for him, I had forceps.

Two specimens of Megetra punctata from southeastern Arizona. Surprisingly the smaller one was a female and the larger a male - I think size is totally related to how much blustery ooze they have left in them and not correlated to gender. These things reflex bleed as soon as they are touched!

❗️Job Alert: Deep-Sea Benthic Biologist (Assistant Professor) at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, USA 🌊 Apply by Dec 1, 2025: apol-recruit.ucsd.edu/JPF04175

📷 Auckland Museum Collections (CC) #MarineBiology

The real danger is that it all seems so plausible. These LLMs are used to save us time, and they can, but each reference has to be checked carefully. Perhaps Google's Notebook does a better job - I'm yet to test that.

Your regular reminder that LLMs give the illusion of fluency, but still hallucinate dangerously when asked about more niche topics, such as ant behaviour.

Here, Gemini invented a paper which I apparently authored. The link works, but sends you to an unrelated paper.

Open Call for Expressions of Interest in Max Planck Directorships: Expressions of interest can be submitted until 31 October 2025.

Director at Max Planck - a unique position! The Open Call for Expressions of Interest in Max Planck Directorships is open now and can be submitted by the 31st of October 2025. ➡️ mpg.de/directors - Please share the Open Call among potential candidates.

Erneuerbare statt Gas – jetzt Appell unterzeichnen! Vom Gas-Konzern direkt ins Kabinett: Katherina Reiche (CDU) will die Erneuerbaren ausbremsen. Das müssen wir verhindern!

Schon mehr als 163.000 verteidigen die Energiewende!

Wirtschaftsministerin Katherina Reiche (CDU) droht mit dem fossilen Rückschritt: Statt erneuerbare Energien voranzubringen, plant sie neue Gaskraftwerke. Im Sinne ihres ehemaligen Arbeitgebers – der Gaswirtschaft.

Hier der Appell dagegen: 👇

We are looking for a Postdoc (up to 5 years) who wants to study neural mechanisms of spatial memory in honeybees.

This includes tetrode recordings in behaving honeybees.

Application Deadline is 1st of October 2025.

More details:
www.biozentrum.uni-wuerzburg.de/en/services/...

Chemical Ecology of Widow Spiders We are hiring for a funded PhD positionapply here Untangling pheromonal communication between and within the sexes of widow spiders Our group is undertaking a comprehensive exploration of the chemi…

🎓 #PhD in Animal Metabolomics & Ecology @unigreifswald🇩🇪
Sexual and non-sexual communication in a widow spider 🕷️⚗️
DFG-funded | 3 years | behavioral ecology & chemical ecology
Details: bit.ly/widow-phd
Apply by Sept 24, start in February 2026
#AcademicSky #pleaserepost