Orit Peleg

Event flyer for ‘The Language of Light: Bioluminescence in the Deep Sea.’ Details: Friday, Nov 14, 4:00 to 5:30 pm, Benson Earth Sciences Auditorium, Room 180. Speaker: Sönke Johnsen, Owens Distinguished Professor, Duke University. Reception 5:30 to 6:30 pm at the Earth Sciences & Map Library. Free, open to the public

Boulder friends: if you’re into animal behavior or vision, come to The Language of Light: Bioluminescence in the Deep Sea with Sönke Johnsen (Duke)!

Fri Nov 14, 4-5:30 pm, Benson Earth Sciences Auditorium, Room 180. Reception 5:30-6:30 at the Earth Sciences & Map Library

Free and open to all!

Event flyer for ‘The Language of Light: Bioluminescence in the Deep Sea.’ Details: Friday, Nov 14, 4:00 to 5:30 pm, Benson Earth Sciences Auditorium, Room 180. Speaker: Sönke Johnsen, Owens Distinguished Professor, Duke University. Reception 5:30 to 6:30 pm at the Earth Sciences & Map Library. Free, open to the public

Boulder friends: if you’re into animal behavior or vision, come to The Language of Light: Bioluminescence in the Deep Sea with Sönke Johnsen (Duke)!

Fri Nov 14, 4-5:30 pm, Benson Earth Sciences Auditorium, Room 180. Reception 5:30-6:30 at the Earth Sciences & Map Library

Free and open to all!

Seminar: Governance Among Plants & Insects with Dr. Orit Peleg · Zoom · Luma Dr. Orit Peleg seeks to understand the behavior of disordered living systems by merging tools from physics, biology, engineering, and computer science. At the…

I'm really looking forward to hosting this @metagov.bsky.social seminar on the governance of bees, fireflies, and plants with my colleage @oritpeleg.bsky.social: luma.com/pzbp4zq1

Even on a Rough Construction Site, Honeybees Figure It Out

#NetSI 's first-year PhD student Chethan Kavaraganahalli Prasanna co-authored a study with Univ. of Colorado Boulder featured in the NYT and published in PLOS Biology (shorturl.at/iHeXb)!

www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/s...

Honeybees adapt to a range of comb cell sizes by merging, tilting, and layering their construction Honeybees often need to build their comb under conditions that prevent a regular hexagonal lattice. This study uses 3D printed panels and X-ray microscopy to explore their adaptive process when differ...

How do #honeybees adapt their comb-building to different spatial constraints? A new study from @oritpeleg.bsky.social &co uses 3D printed panels and X-ray microscopy to reveal the existence of three distinct construction modes, from tilting cells to building complex 3D structures.🧪
plos.io/4n1g6Hs

Can it please be a quilt?

Close-up of experimental honeycombs built after a challenging 3D printed setup, showing mostly hexagonal cells.

New paper in PLOS Biology: as we raise the difficulty of our 3D printed puzzles, bees keep landing on combs with ever stranger hexagonal order! 🐝

Led by the brilliant Golnar Gharooni Fard, in collaboration with CK Prasanna & FL Jiménez

journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

❤️🙏

Title page of the review article 'The Physics of Sensing and Decision-Making by Animal Groups' by Danielle L. Chase and Orit Peleg in Annual Review of Biophysics. Includes illustrations of collective behavior in honeybees: a diagram showing uncommitted scout bees transitioning through decision-making to choose between two nest sites; a honeybee on a honeycomb cell; a cluster of bees hanging from a branch; and a schematic of bees forming a layered cluster.

More on collective behavior: Our new Annual Review of Biophysics piece - with the stellar Danielle Chase - explores how animals sense, share information, and make group decisions. In honeybees and beyond 🐝

www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

Emergence of Brains This review traces how ideas from statistical physics evolved into foundational models of neural computation, shaping modern AI and culminating in the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics.

It was an honor to write this, but also great fun. A chance to look back at the classics, and think about the path forward. #Physics is a beautiful human endeavor. journals.aps.org/prxlife/abst...

Principles, mechanisms and functions of entrainment in biological oscillators | Interface Focus Entrainment is a phenomenon in which two oscillators interact with each other, typically through physical or chemical means, to synchronize their oscillations. This phenomenon occurs in biology to coo...

Love this example! The seabird rhythms are a great case of synchronised clocks in the wild. Coupled oscillator entrainment is a whole rabbit hole of its own... A handy overview is here: royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

We didn’t forget the tangled worms! They make an appearance in our Annual Review of Biophysics piece (with another stellar postdoc, Danielle Chase), where we discuss how blackworms weave themselves into living soft matter and the resilience that brings:

www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

❤️🪱

Three‑row table linking scales: fish, penguin, ant. Each row shows an individual silhouette, a pair‑level interaction image, and the emergent collective - schooling fish, penguin huddle, and an ant raft.

New review in PRX Life, where we propose a tangibility scale for the physics of social interactions, and highlight a few tangible examples - from dead fish “swimming” to efficient schooling, warm penguin huddles, and dry ant rafts.
Written with the brilliant Chantal Nguyen 🐟🐧🐜

tinyurl.com/naet5tdh

Fireflies are flourishing in places you wouldn't expect Pesticides, habitat loss, and light pollution are threatening firefly populations worldwide, but even in urban areas, some lightning bugs continue to shine.

Fireflies are still generally declining, & light pollution is one big reason why, but a few species are also carrying on in places that are bathed in artificial light. Which is pretty wild!

Featuring Sriram Murali's excellent photography! 🧪

www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/arti...

The 16th-Century Artist Who Created the First Compendium of Insect Drawings Before the invention of the microscope and the field of entomology emerged, Joris Hoefnagel devoted himself to the natural world.

Nearly a century before the invention of the microscope and even longer before entomology became a field of research, Joris Hoefnagel (1542-1600) devoted himself to studying the natural world. He's thought to have created the first compendium of its kind.

🙏❤️

📣 We're on the lookout for a creative postdoc with strong computational skills!

Be the go-to person in the lab for building simple but powerful simulations that test wild ideas on biological rythems: from daily cycles of mussel groups at deep sea, to firefly flash synchronization!

More info below👇

🤩

Thank you so much!

Awesome, thank you!

The longer the better, but even just a few nights would be great 🙏

Whoohoo! Thank you @devonianstone.bsky.social

🙏

Help us record firefly flashes! 👇🙏

Hello hello #complexity and #emergence people.

I'm getting a complexity+emergence (broadly defined) starter pack going.

I've focused on active accounts that often make original posts (not just reposts) and have at least a few thousand followers. Inclusion is not endorsement.

go.bsky.app/BLuVyWj

Orit Peleg

Fireflies. Photo by Mac Stone

Decoding 🌟 firefly communication & conservation in Colorado

Join us for a *free* evening talk by @oritpeleg.bsky.social at the Mountain Research Station (run by @colorado.edu + INSTAAR):
🗓 Wed Jun 18th
🕖 7:00 pm
📍 Near Ward CO
🔗 calendar.colorado.edu/event/orit-p...

The Mathematical Mysteries of Fireflies What blinking bugs reveal about synchrony in the universe

Among the thousands of firefly species in the world, only a handful blink in sync. While both male and female fireflies flash, only the males synchronize. 🧪

Fleeting fireflies illuminate Colorado summer nights − and researchers are watching New research uses firefly flashing patterns to identify species and what they’re communicating.

In these chaotic times, I’ve been grounding myself in my mentees’ successes: here’s a beautiful story by PhD candidate Owen Martin (@lepurplemartin.bsky.social) on Colorado’s fireflies 🌟✨ theconversation.com/fleeting-fir...

That’s like, your opinion, man

Lead author Auke-Florian Hiemstra holds the oldest known caddisfly casing containing microplastic, dating to 1971. Photo: Liselotte Rambonnet.

A caddisfly casing with pieces of blue microplastic, dating 1986. Photo: Auke-Florian Hiemstra

NEW PAPER, JUST OUT! 👀

Insects from the '70s and '80s were already collecting microplastic, decades before the term microplastic even existed. 🤯

A thread on the surprising history of this pollutant and the incredible insect larvae that helped us uncover it. 🐛

Let's dive in! 🧵👇 1/x