Jerome Beetz

Come and work with us in our new home @bristolbiosci.bsky.social ! This fully funded PhD opportunity is open to anyone interested in spiders/eyes/light pollution/evolution/development! 🕷️👀

⏰Deadline 15th December, online info event TODAY @2pm! Link in the PhD advert👉 www.findaphd.com/phds/project...

YouTube video by Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior Lochlan Walsh | Insect sensory biology

How do insects use vision to interact with flowers? IMPRS-QBEE student @lochlanw.bsky.social, working with @anna-stoeckl.bsky.social tells us more about his work on hummingbird hawkmoths and how they interact with flower patterns

@mpi-animalbehav.bsky.social

youtube.com/shorts/juEhw...

Praying mantises possess multiple spectral photoreceptor classes - Journal of Comparative Physiology A Praying mantises often display elaborate camouflage, disappearing into the shapes, textures, and colors around them. But they have largely been thought to be monochromats, unable to perceive the color...

Praying mantises demontrate remarkable camouflage although they had been thought to be colorblind. A new ERG study reveals that 2 of 3 tested mantises species are trichromatic highlighting a physiological capacity for color vision.
@springernature.com

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Frontiers | Social calls of big brown bats in a competitive feeding context Big brown bats (Eptesicus fuscus) have a diverse vocal repertoire. We tested the hypothesis that frequency-modulated bouts (FMBs) are male-specific calls pro...

Bats are highly social animals showing a huge vocal repetoire. A new study of the Simmons lab monitored vocalizations between pairs of 🦇 that were competing for food in the lab. Six social call types, e.g., frequency-modulated bouts (FMBs), were common.
www.frontiersin.org/journals/eco...

Towards a neuroethological approach to consciousness | Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences Understanding consciousness remains a significant challenge in science. What distinguishes conscious beings from unconscious systems, such as organoids, artificial intelligence or other non-sentient e...

Our paper “Towards a neuroethological approach to consciousness” is out in Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B.

Together with @talking-bat.bsky.social and Lucia Melloni, we suggest bringing Tinbergen’s framework into consciousness research.

a wasp with silver head and thorax, red legs and abdomen, grasps onto a dead twig with her mandibles while she sleeps at night in a desert shrub

her highness sleeps

Ammophila wasp on brittlebush (Encelia) distal twigs at night

take a close look ... she is SPECTACULAR!

Two individually marked bumble bees are shown in a tunnel used for affective contagion experiments.

This week in Science, researchers demonstrate positive affective contagion—a core component of empathy—in bumble bees.

The discovery shows that even insects can share affective states, tracing the roots of affect and social cognition deep into evolution. Learn more: https://scim.ag/4oblMQq

Divergent sensory transcriptomic profiles in positive and negative learning in Bicyclus Anynana butterflies - Journal of Comparative Physiology A Journal of Comparative Physiology A - Mate preference learning, where individuals learn to prefer or avoid specific phenotypes during mate selection, is pervasive across animal taxa and influences...

🚨 New paper out in #JCP-A @springernature.com "Divergent sensory transcriptomic profiles in positive and negative learning in Bicyclus Anynana butterflies" by Yi Teng Ter & Erica Westerman #Neurogenomics #VisualLearning #Lepidoptera 🧪🧠🦋
↘️ link.springer.com/article/10.1... ↙️

YouTube video by Weizmann Institute of Science Bat Island: The New Era of Science

Neuroscience projects last several years, and you are usually a bit jaded by the time you wrap it up. Not this one– spending several months on an island in the middle of nowhere, away from all the craziness of the world reminds you how beautiful the world really is.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=46sv...

Thrilled to announce I'll be joining the Division of Neuroscience at @manchester.ac.uk as a Lecturer in Feb '26!

The DuLab will explore how the brain integrates sensory streams into internal maps 🌐 using the rodent head-direction circuit, the 'neural compass', as a starting point for the journey 🧭

Interested in the brain, circuits, and behavior?
Enjoy tinkering and asking bold questions in neuroscience?

The Forli Lab (IIT, Genova, Italy) is hiring!

🧠 🔬 🟩◻️🟥->🍕🚫🍍

Check out our website for updates:
sites.google.com/view/forli-lab

A textbook example what the field of neuroethology is about. Studying the brain in the wild. Congrats to these awesome findings. 🥳😃

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!

Paper & incredible science alert: Our assistant professor @laurastidsholt.bsky.social & a passionate team @elena-tena.bsky.social @ebdonana.bsky.social found proof for greater nocturnal #bats 🦇 preying on migratory birds 🐦 AND devouring them in flight! #bioacoustics
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

New preprint from the lab: A reference brain for the clonal raider ant.
With this resource, which is based on 40 individual brains, you can register and compare all kinds of samples in a common space. It comes with lots of detailed protocols and a user-friendly GUI.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Look forward seeing your upcoming projects on these incredible flies. 🙂

Finding a path: Local search behavior of Drosophila larvae Orientation and navigation are essential features of animals living in changing environments. Typically, animals integrate a variety of allothetic and idiothetic cues to achieve their navigational goa...

New study @jexpbiol.bsky.social on local search behavior in Drosophila larvae. Results suggest that local search is mainly mediated by idiothetic cues. journals.biologists.com/jeb/article/...

Neural Basis of Odometry in Drosophila Path integration is a mode of navigation in which travel distance and direction are integrated to calculate position. Estimating travel distance, or ‘odometry,’ requires the summation of translational...

Vector navigation is common in insects. While directional coding has been studied in great detail, we know less about how distances are represented in the brain. @idatri.bsky.social & S. DasGrupta study the neural mechanisms of odometry in flies.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

The Company of Biologists 100-year anniversary logo

Thank you to everyone for their support over the past 100 years, and for helping us celebrate this year. You can catch up with all our 100-year content on our special anniversary page bit.ly/4naj8Jr

Male CNS Connectome A team of researchers has unveiled the complete connectome of a male fruit fly central nervous system —a seamless map of all the neurons in the brain and nerve cord of a single male fruit fly and the ...

We're very proud to be releasing the complete male fly CNS connectome!

It's the product of a huge team effort here at Janelia in partnership with the Cambridge Fly Connectomics group (@jefferis.bsky.social and colleagues), plus invaluable collaborators.

More soon...
www.janelia.org/project-team...

Only one day left to apply for this 5 year Postdoc. Everyone with experience in electrophysiology and a keen interest in #neuroethology is welcomed to apply. More infos about our lab can also be found here: www.spatial-navigation.com
🐝🧠🇩🇪

🐝 Can #ElectricFields from #powerlines disrupt #honeybee foraging? A new #iScience study says yes — AC & +DC fields cut landings by 71% 🌸⚡

🧾Read here: www.cell.com/iscience/ful...

#ElectricPollution #PollinatorHealth #Entomology #Agroecology #EcoResearch #InsectScience #SaveTheBees #FieldEcology

That is the longer one 😉

This project was the result of @nicolas-scheuring.bsky.social bachelor thesis who is currently conducting his master thesis in my lab.

Insect spatial memory is thought to be based on panoramic snapshots that are modelled as retinotopic images. This idea won't allow a distinction of landmarks from the scene. Unexpectedly, our data suggest that 🐝 learn 3D-objects as individual landmarks. #neuroethology
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

How Birds Find Their Way

Check out new research into the fascinating and challenging world of #AvianNavigation! 🦉 'How Birds Find Their Way', by Helmut Satz, describes our current understanding of the navigation of birds, their methods, capabilities, and achievements. bit.ly/42bC5Um #BookSky

A multisensory, bidirectional, valence encoder guides behavioral decisions A key function of the brain is to categorize sensory cues as repulsive or attractive and respond accordingly. While we have some understanding of how sensory information is processed in the sensory pe...

How is valence computed in the brain? Check out our new preprint about a single cell that integrates excitatory and inhibitory input across modalities according to valence and impacts behavioral decisions. An exciting collaboration across many labs. Enjoy reading!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Now out in @nature.com: Our study discovering a neural circuit in Drosophila that predictively inhibits proprioceptor axons during voluntary leg movements, such as walking and grooming. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Congrats to this amazing study. 🙂

« Diverse calcium dynamics underlie place field formation in hippocampal CA1 pyramidal cells. »

A fundamental study now published @elife.bsky.social

elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre...