Shaun Killen

Can't wait to start this cross disciplinary project with a fantastic team, including @kochhanndaiani.bsky.social, @katjaenberg.bsky.social, Nick Hanley, Kath Sloman, and many others. Linking fish welfare, rural livelihoods, and rainforest conservation. Postdoc (x2) and tech positions forthcoming. 🙂

Nation could really use Catherine O'Hara to deal with passing of Catherine O'Hara OTTAWA - Following the passing of screen and comedy legend Catherine O'Hara, nationwide reports indicate that the only thing Canadians could use to cheer them up from their grief is Catherine O'Hara.

Nation could really use Catherine O'Hara to deal with passing of Catherine O'Hara

Fatal Attraction: Light Pollution Creates an Ecological Trap for Wild Fish This graphical abstract provides a snapshot of the ecological trap created by artificial light. At night, larval fish are attracted to illuminated habitats and settle there, but subsequently experien...

Apologies, the link above doesn't work. Use this one for the paper! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

I have two #PhD scholarships available on either the ecophysiology or movement ecology of the Pilbara leaf-nosed #bat at @murdoch.edu.au 🦇

Apply now: www.murdoch.edu.au/study/schola...

Lab website: www.nicholaswulab.com

Our new paper in @globalchangebio.bsky.social: artificial light at night creates an ecological trap for wild reef fish. Settlement ↑ under artificial light (up to 8× higher), but survival ~50% lower due to predation, disrupted settlement timing, and altered metabolic rhythms: doi.org/10.1111/gcb....

Finally moving beyond the fiction of a constant metabolic baseline will give us a more realistic foundation for bioenergetics, ecology, and evolution! (9/9)

We are not saying SMR is useless. We are saying it should be treated as state-dependent, or explicitly time-integrated across the sleep–wake cycle, depending on the biological question. (8/9)

These effects may have implications for repeatability, heritability, metabolic scaling, behaviour–metabolism links, thermal performance curves, and even “calming effects” of conspecifics. Sleep architecture is a hidden axis in ALL of these. (7/9)

Derived traits are affected too. Because aerobic scope = MMR − SMR, state-biased SMR estimates can inflate or shrink apparent performance capacity, even if maximum performance is unchanged. (6/9)

Environmental or treatment effects can also be missed entirely. If a factor affects a sleep-dominant process and SMR is measured during wake (or vice versa), any metabolic change may never be detected. (5/9)

This creates systematic measurement bias. SMR measured only during sleep underestimates daily maintenance costs; SMR measured only during wake overestimates them. The size and direction of the bias depend on sleep duration and sleep architecture. (4/9)

Wake, NREM sleep, and REM sleep each prioritise different physiological processes, with distinct energetic demands. How maintenance is defined and what constitutes SMR depends entirely on WHEN you measure it. (3/9)

Basal and standard metabolic rate are treated as fixed traits: the minimum cost of staying alive. But many core maintenance processes are not continuously active. Instead, they are temporally partitioned across wakefulness and different sleep states. (2/9)

Thread: In our new paper in Biological Reviews, we argue that one of physiology’s most basic assumptions is wrong. There is no single, static “baseline” metabolic rate. Instead, sleep-wake cycles quietly subvert how BMR and SMR are usually interpreted. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/... (1/9)

Congrats @helenanorman.bsky.social on an amazing poster!

Day 2 of ShoalBase Fishmas: Snowflake eel (Echidna nebulosa) ❄️🐍 SB-00132: Usually solitary and nocturnal, sheltering among rocks and reefs. Being solitary is a form of sociality! Territorial encounters also occur. Seen this species? Add an observation to ShoalBase!

Day 1 of ShoalBase Fishmas ❄️🐟 Contribution SB-00131: Polar cod. This species schools beneath Arctic sea ice, but spread as ice cover increases, showing how social behaviour can change with environment. Have you seen this species? Add it again! You don’t need detailed data, simple observations help!

SLR tests assume a single sample phase is enough for learning.
In our new paper, minnows only discriminated object locations after five exposures, a species-specific result with implications for how we assess cognition in fishes. Exploration also predicted performance. doi.org/10.1111/eth....

Please help us classify all fish species by their social systems 🙏! Any and all observations or general knowledge are useful. Log them at shoalbase.org, the form takes about a minute to fill in 😀.

ShoalBase | Explore and Contribute ShoalBase offers a global database on fish social behaviour, supporting research, conservation, and ecology through community contributions and visual data mapping.

If you’ve ever watched fish, you have knowledge worth sharing! Help us map the social systems of 35,000+ species.
Contribute a record here, it only takes a minute!: shoalbase.org

That sounds incredible!

Thank you! Please add some information on shark species! This would be incredibly useful 🙏

That would absolutely amazing to add to shoalbase! It's as simple as filling in a small form that classifies species' social systems. It takes a min or two per observation. We can provide help if needed!

ShoalBase | Join, Explore, Contribute Now ShoalBase offers a global database on fish social behaviour, supporting research, conservation, and ecology through community contributions and visual data mapping.

Published records of fish social systems are valuable, but often lost in the literature; informal observations can fill gaps. ShoalBase can centralise literature and log new observations so patterns become visible. Know a paper? Please add it! Seen a behaviour? Please add that too! shoalbase.org

Of course, centralising social behaviour classifications from within the published literature is crucial too, and ShoalBase is also built for that purpose!

9/9 If you’ve ever watched fish, in the field, a tank, while fishing, or on a dive, you already have data that matters! Everyday observations are incredibly valuable. We’d love your contributions, ideas, dream features, and feedback!

8/9 The long-term goal is to create the largest open resource on fish social systems built on community science and open data.

7/9 The interactive Explore page already shows emerging patterns by species, country, habitat, and life stage even with early submissions. As the dataset grows, so will the depth of analysis.

6/9 What can the data be used for? Mapping global patterns, improving welfare and husbandry, informing fisheries and conservation, generating new hypotheses, and highlighting major knowledge gaps.

5/9 Who can contribute? Anyone who watches fish - researchers, divers, aquarists, students, naturalists, recreational or professional fishers. The form takes 1-2 min and guidance is provided.