Tyler Andres-Bray

Mapping nonhuman cultures with the Animal Culture Database - Scientific Data Scientific Data - Mapping nonhuman cultures with the Animal Culture Database

Happy to share our new paper introducing the Animal Culture Database in Scientific Data: We’re putting together a resource consolidating primary research on cultural behaviors in wild animal populations and how they’re affected by human activity (1/5) www.nature.com/articles/s41...

NEW: Under Trump, the National Science Foundation is awarding grants at the slowest pace in decades. We took a detailed look at every area of science affected by the funding lag. Here's a gift link: www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

It's official! I just accepted a faculty position at UCLA. Starting this summer, I will be joining the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology dept and the Learning Sciences Core as an Asst Prof of Teaching. I'm very excited to be joining this great group of educators.

This was some great work with some great people! Happy to have been a part.

if you are white, and especially if you are perceived as a cis man, one of the most important skills you can practice right now to meaningfully resist fascism now and in the future is the art of being a *polite inconvenience*

I support trans rights; I recognise and respect trans people and their right to exist the same as others; I resent and object to the tired lies that bigots promote. Trans rights are human rights.

Forcing people to pay $130 for a passport in order to vote is just a Jim Crow poll tax by another name.

It is blatantly unconstitutional.

Deep red Lancaster County PA. #handsoff #handsoffLanco @aclu @meidastouch.com 🌊💪

🧪 Chapel Hill, NC #HandsOff

We also used a method incorporated from the learning sciences, called Epistemic Network Analysis, which is very helpful for visualizing and comparing behavioral variation between groups/contexts. Check out our paper and let me know if you have questions!

#chimpanzee #research #tooluse

We look at variation in tool use within this community and compare how they fish for termites to chimpanzee communities studied by Boesch et al. (2020).

Our chimp community, Ganga, had 46 unique combinations of behaviors to fish for termites and were more similar to savanna-dwelling chimps.

Patterns of Technical Variation in Chimpanzee Termite Fishing Behavior in Mbam and Djerem National Park, Cameroon Chimpanzees exhibit considerable inter- and intra-community variation in cognitively complex tool use behaviors, often attributed to social, genetic, and environmental factors. Termite fishing is a w....

Coming out if hibernation to share some newly published work from my diss in a special issue on student-led research from the American Journal of Primatology!
doi.org/10.1002/ajp....

We looked at termite fishing behavior in a new community of understudied Nigeria-Cameroon chimpanzees in Cameroon.

Hey look a portal open to public submission, hope no one floods it with the Bee Movie script to the point of being unusable or something

The effect of seeing scientists as intellectually humble on trust in scientists and their research - Nature Human Behaviour Across five pre-registered studies, Koetke et al. find that perceptions of scientists’ intellectual humility positively affect the perceived trustworthiness of scientists and their research.

We don’t need better stories. We need to be humble. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Fundamentals of Ecology Course has now begun and is now running via NPTEL! The course is taught by various faculty of
@iiscbangalore
.

The course covers broad topics in Ecology; prerequisites, free & is open for all!

preview: onlinecourses.nptel.ac.in/noc25_ge14/p...

Reg last date~27th Jan.

Disability in ecology and evolution In this TrendsTalk series ‘Disability in ecology and evolution’ in Trends in Ecology & Evolution, we will be hearing from people about their experiences being disabled or having a chronic condition an...

I guess I hadn't posted this yet and didn't even know it had come out-- I was interviewed for (and co-wrote w/Daniel Rabosky) a Trends in Ecology & Evolution "TrendsTalk" article on "Disability in ecology and evolution" -- www.cell.com/trends/ecolo... #DisabledInSTEM #academicchatter #academia

Terminology in ecology and evolutionary biology disproportionately harms marginalized groups The discipline of ecology and evolutionary biology has long grappled with issues of inclusivity and representation. This study finds that individuals from marginalized groups were more likely to be ha...

2025. #DEI. Terminology in ecology and evolutionary biology disproportionately harms marginalized groups dx.plos.org/10.1371/jour... 795 survey respondents.... almost half agreed that there are harmful terms in EEB.... via @plosbiology.org

A round jellyfish with glowing golden stripes on the bell and long tendril tentacles against a background of deep sea sediment.

An anemone with many white thin tentacles

A close up into the centre of a feather duster worm with radiating striped white and brown tentacles

A semi-translucent octopus with a spotted mantle and blue tentacles.

Happy New Year from invertebrates that look like fireworks.

Credits
Jellyfish: OET/Nautilus Live
Anemone: Cathy Lewis
Feather duster worm: Pauline Walsh Jacobsen
Octopus: Schmidt Ocean Institute

A Triple Threat to Humanity: Climate Change, Pandemics, and Anti-Science | Skeptical Inquirer Over the past decade, many of us in the scientific community have come to appreciate the existential threat we face today—a threat unlike any we’ve witnesse ...

"A Triple Threat to Humanity: Climate Change, Pandemics, and Anti-Science" | My new article with Peter Hotez in #SkepticalInquirer: skepticalinquirer.org/2024/12/a-tr...

Africa is climatically extreme, and through the climate change will become even more extreme

Why insects are so crucial to life on Earth - BBC Ideas Watch the "Why insects are so crucial to life on Earth" video at BBC Ideas. Explore other related content via our curated "Nature and us" playlist.

Brilliant BBC animated report by ecologist David Goulson on the vital role of insects in our ecosystems and the real threats of declining populations

Jimmy Carter Signed 14 Major Environmental Bills and Foresaw the Threat of Climate Change - Inside Climate News From “His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life”  by Jonathan Alter. Copyright © 2020 by Jonathan Alter. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc. This year’s wildfires and hurricanes leave no doubt...

Don’t think I ever truly understood the scale of Jimmy Carter’s environmental record while president. He
“signed 14 major pieces of environmental legislation, including the first funding of alternative energy, the first federal toxic waste cleanup (the Super Fund), (1/3)

Impact of author characteristics on outcomes of single- versus double-blind peer review: a systematic review of comparative studies in scientific abstracts and publications - Scientometrics The purpose of this systematic review was to assess the role of double-blind (DB) peer review on bias against authors when compared to single-blind (SB) peer review in scientific publications. Using…

Single-blind #peerreview leads to more positive outcomes if you are:
- male
- White
- in the US or North America
- well-published or known in your field
- affiliated with a prestigious institution

Can we please make double-blind the gold standard now?

🧪 #academicsky #SciPub

I may not know what day of the week or day of the month it is, but I managed to get most of the Blackboard site for my evidence-based STEM pedagogy course set up today. So, that feels good.

Diversity of experience is important for academia, and barriers for people from underrepresented groups - like first-generation students - continue to persist.

Tenure-track faculty are likely to have parents who went to grad school — a trend that hasn’t changed for 50 years Faculty were also significantly more likely to have grown up in wealthy, urban areas than the general public, study finds.

And I believe therein lies a problem…

I feel seen.

Instead of listing my publications, as the year draws to an end, I want to shine the spotlight on the commonplace assumption that productivity must always increase. Good research is disruptive and thinking time is central to high quality scholarship and necessary for disruptive research.