Amanda Melin

Hiring for 3 positions: Research Assistant, Field Research Coordinator, and Postdoc I am looking to hire 3 people into my lab this year. I am still doing the paperwork to get the jobs officially posted but I want to send the word out and screen potential applications right away. R…

I am hiring a research assistant (vampire bats), a Panama fieldwork coordinator (vampire bats), and also considering postdoc apps (social behavior, any species): socialbat.org/2026/02/19/h...

We are thrilled to announce that, thanks to the support of our institutional subscribers, all Royal Society subscription journals will be open access in 2026 through #S2O. Researchers can read all articles and publish #OpenAccess in our eight subscription journals for free buff.ly/4Lu9VpW

A four panel comic, from left to right: 1960s LIFE IS BASED ON DNA, WHICH USES RNA TO MAKE PROTEINS THAT DO STUFF. 1980s ALSO, THE RNA DOES SOME STUFF ITSELF, WHICH IS WEIRD. 2000s THERE ARE 50 MANY KINDS OF RNA. IT'S DOING SO MUCH STUFF! 2020s LIFE IS A SEETHING MASS OF RNA THAT SOMETIMES USES DNA TO TAKE NOTES. WHAT DO THE PROTEINS DO? ERRANDS FOR RNA.

It’s an RNA world. RNA is posited to be the first genetic material, arising 4 billion years ago. It can store information and act as an enzyme. Eventually, it duplicated its information into a more stable form, DNA.

Ecological and social pressures drive same-sex sexual behaviour in non-human primates - Nature Ecology & Evolution Phylogenetic regression and structural equation modelling of environmental, social and life history traits across the primate clade indicates correlates for same-sex sexual behaviour (SSB), and sugges...

Ecological and social pressures drive same-sex sexual behaviour in non-human primates 🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A typology of rules for knowledge exchange in higher-order interactions Author summary Learning from each other is important to humans and other animals as it provides safe or quick ways to gather information about the world around you. Because of this ‘social learning’, ...

A new paper in @plos.org Complex Systems from my time at @nimbios.bsky.social with Nina Fefferman.
We set out some ways of classifying rules for social learning and knowledge exchange in higher-order networks.
doi.org/10.1371/jour...

New paper from our Rwenzori colobus & Sam Stead's dissertation. We examined female glucocorticoids & found a U-shaped distribution with unit size! Females also had increase to parturition & a decrease throughout lactation. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

ASAB Winter/Spring Newsletter 2026 ASAB Winter/Spring Newsletter 2026

The latest ASAB newsletter is out! If want these sent to your e-mail, remember to sign up for the mailing list at asab.org/newsletters

Read here:

Cuttlefish Literally Twist Light to Attract a Mate, Study Finds Every critter on this planet that relies on a sexual means of reproduction has its own way of luring in a mate – but cuttlefish can do something really special.

“Male Andrea cuttlefish (Doratosepion andreanum) – quite drab to human eyes – use their birefringent arms to literally twist light, creating a highly conspicuous signal precisely tuned to cuttlefish vision.”

#scicomm

www.sciencealert.com/cuttlefish-l...
🧪 🐙 🦑

Revealing the hidden patterns of shark and ray diversity over the past 145 million years Gardiner et al. reconstruct the diversity of sharks and rays across the past 145 million years using deep learning and an extensive dataset. Their results unveil previously hidden patterns, including ...

Our new paper is online! We found that 1) today's shark & ray diversity was already reached ~100Ma; 2) that the K/Pg extinction was not catastrophic; 3) that the max diversity was reached ~50Ma; and 4) that today's diversity is depleted compared to the past.
www.cell.com/current-biol...

The Top Human Evolution Discoveries of 2025, From the Intriguing Neanderthal Diet to the Oldest Western European Face Fossil Smithsonian paleoanthropologists examine the year’s most fascinating revelations

Happy New Year! Delighted and honoured to have our research featured in the top human evolution discoveries of 2025 by @smithsonianmag.bsky.social 🎉!

Winter ASAB 2025 December 15-16h Edinburgh How Sensory information affects behaviour

Final schedule for #ASABWinter2025 is up! We have some fantastic talks and posters ahead of us 🥰 ❄️ 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

asabwinter.github.io/2025/schedule/

Come to Canada

Multispecies sensory networks and social foraging strategies: Implications for population decline in procellariiform seabirds | PNAS Multispecies sensory networks, where different species prioritize different sensory modalities and then use heterospecific information in a likely ...

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Join us for Fall 2026. In our group, you can run studies from human behavior and neuroimaging, to large-scale NHP ephys, and join them up with a robust computational foundation. Bonus: you can help build the reading list.

This bright orange life-form could point to new dino discoveries Colorful lichen living on dinosaur bones reflect infrared light that can be detected by drones, which might lead to finds in remote areas.

“In the badlands of western Canada, two species of lichen prefer making their homes on dinosaur bones instead of on the surrounding desert rock, and their distinct orange color can be detected by drones, possibly aiding future dino discoveries”

#scicomm

www.sciencenews.org/article/lich...
🧪

🚨Two funded PhDs on the evolutionary ecology of antipredator colouration 🦋 with myself and Iliana Medina.

One in Swansea tinyurl.com/4thtbph6 deadline Jan 12th @crocus-dla.bsky.social

The other in Melbourne - deadline Jan 1st

Please share among potential students!

Please enjoy a small photo dump from the Dry Forest of the Área de Conservación Guanacaste, Costa Rica.

We are interested in what capuchin monkeys can teach us about the evolution of sensorimotor intelligence and sensitive discriminative touch. Here, Luna demonstrates an excellent example of skilled hand use!

Postdoc position in individual-level incentives, social
learning, and payoff-biased imitation shape group-level accuracy in complex prediction and decision-making tasks in Konstanz

files.newsletter2go.com/l3slzozn/s_i...

This flower smells like injured ants — and flies can’t resist it A type of Japanese dogsbane releases a scent identical to wounded ants’ distress signal, drawing in scavenging flies that unwittingly pollinate it.

“Experiments revealed that the plant’s odor is a near-perfect chemical match to the distress signals released by injured ants”

#scicomm
#sensoryecology
#mimetism
#mimicry
#chemicalcommunication

www.sciencenews.org/article/flow...
🧪 🌸 🐜 🪰 🐙

The Scent Gland Microbiomes of Wild Tamarins Provide New Insight Into Microbial Contributions to Olfactory Communication Our study investigated the microbiomes of suprapubic and sternal scent glands in two wild tamarin species to explore their putative roles in odor production and communication. Using metagenomic seque...

dx.doi.org/10.1002/ece3...

Led by PhD Candidate @silviacarboni.bsky.social, our new paper explores the contributions of surface microbes to the production of odours in the scent glands of wild tamarins. A great collaboration with Dr. Alice Poirier and @fieldprojects.org #sensoryecology

Single antivenom protects against 17 different snakebites Researchers immunized an alpaca and a llama with snake venoms, and combined some of the antibodies produced into a potent cocktail.

Single antivenom nanobody protects against 17 different snakebites @nature.com
www.nature.com/articles/d41...
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
www.nature.com/articles/d41...
@andreaslaustsen.bsky.social

Sensory expectations shape neural population dynamics in motor circuits Nature - Experiments with human volunteers and macaques show that expectations produced by probabilistic cueing of future sensory inputs shape motor circuit dynamics in order to increase the...

Thrilled that our paper is out today in Nature!
www.nature.com/articles/s4...

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...

“There’s nothing more Canadian than the hockey game being interrupted to celebrate the Blue Jays heading to the World Series”

#Canada
#BlueJays
#WorldSeries

🚨🚨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

Great week for Canadian Wildlife! This beauty Great Horned Owl is hanging outside my cabin ❤️

Quality, quantity, and the adaptive function of social relationships Affiliative social relationships have clear links to fitness in many species, yet exactly why that is the case remains elusive. We unify theory from socioecology and network science to set forth testa...

For what seems like forever, I've wanted to know what benefits we get from our friends - or in other words, why these relationships evolved.

tinyurl.com/55dnkeh7

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

ICYMI Notre Dame Anthropology will be hiring a post-doc for 2026-2028. This is part of a university-wide initiative to support early career scholars. Deadline is Oct. 31...sorry for late notice.

apply.interfolio.com/171503