Vivek Hari Sridhar

Out today in @plosbiology.org (1/5)

Siblings and non-parental adults provide alternative pathways to cultural inheritance in juvenile great tits 🐦🧩

Link to study:
10.0.5.91/journal.pbio...

Co-authors:
@lucymaplin.bsky.social
@galarconnieto.bsky.social

Today IUCN has officially declared the Slender-billed Curlew extinct, marking the first known global extinction of a formerly widespread migratory bird species whose range included mainland Europe, North Africa, and West Asia.

Read more here ⬇️
www.unep-aewa.org/fr/node/6632

The first preprint from my PhD work is out! We used C. elegans to define and manipulate heterogeneous groups, exploring how individuals with different behavioural phenotypes interact and shape collective behavior. Check it out here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

A juvenile great tit solves a foraging puzzle by pushing a sliding door to the left while being observed by two other juvenile birds. Image credit: Sonja Wild.

@sonjawild.bsky.social @galarconnieto.bsky.social & @lucymaplin.bsky.social show that young #GreatTits, which have limited #ParentalCare, learn to solve a foraging #puzzle socially, but rather than parents, siblings & non-parental adults are preferred role models @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/46JZn6n

Hidden networks in the brain Dendritic nanotubes extend brain connectivity beyond synapses

I love these new layers of complexity that people are discovering in the brain! Dendrites of different neurons can connect via nanotubes, which transport calcium and cargo such as amyloid-beta www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

A causal framework for the drivers of animal social network structure Author summary Behavioural ecologists ask mechanistic questions about behaviour—causal questions. When studying animal societies, these questions often concern the drivers of social network structure....

Are you studying animal sociality?

My (now published) first PhD chapter proposes a Bayesian + causal framework to infer the factors shaping the social relationships that animals form with one another.

journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

Analysis of communication and collective behavior in animal groups

⭐PhD position available!⭐
Come join us @imprs-qbee.bsky.social to study communication and collective behavior in animal groups! We're looking for someone excited to use computational approaches to tackle biological questions, using our full-group tracking datasets
imprs-qbee.mpg.de/121465/analy...

A white-fronted bee-eater (Merops bullockoides) decides whether to consume a warningly colored white-barred acraea butterfly (Telchinia encedon). Photo (c) Mike Rowe

📢🦋 Our paper ‘Global selection on insect antipredator coloration’ is out and featured on the cover of @science.org

We ran a huge experiment to find out how ecological context favours camouflage and warning colouration as antipredator strategies. 1/6

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Most people are right- some left-handed or ambidextrous - and so are honey buzzards when turning in thermals! But, unlike us, mastering flight means these birds must overcome laterality as they grow. A gem of a preprint led by @enourani.bsky.social. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

I get that the news cycle is packed right now, but I just heard from a colleague at the Smithsonian that this is fully a GIANT SQUID BEING EATEN BY A SPERM WHALE and it’s possibly the first ever confirmed video according to a friend at NOAA

10 YEAR OLD ME IS LOSING HER MIND (a thread 🧵)

Tenure-track Assistant Professor in Computational Ecology and/or Evolution @columbiauniversity.bsky.social.
Deadline to apply September 30.
Reach out if you have questions.

apply.interfolio.com/172496

🚨 PhD alert! IMPRS brain & behavior in Bonn just opened their calls for applications. Great PhD funding opportunities. Check it out! PS- I just joined their faculty, meaning you could do a rotation in my lab or even a PhD with me on spider sleep 🙃 Apply! 🚨

Ant queen lays eggs that hatch into two species Bizarre discovery of interspecies cloning “almost impossible to believe,” biologists say

“Just when you think you’ve seen it all, social insects reveal another surprise.” https://scim.ag/47sVFyS

Ant reproduction is getting weirder and weirder. Here’s the latest: queens of a Mediterranean harvester ant mate with males from a different species and then lay eggs that clonally inherit those males’ genome. I.e., they lay eggs that develop into a different species. 🤯

Queue the song “weird fishes”

AI, peer review and the human activity of science When researchers cede their scientific judgement to machines, we lose something important.

@carlbergstrom.com and I have a piece on how to think the risks and benefits of LLMs for things like peer review.

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

swaRmverse: An R package for the comparative analysis of collective motion Collective motion, that is the coordinated spatial and temporal organisation of individuals, is a core element in the study of collective animal behaviour. The self-organised properties of how a g...

with @shoalgroup.bsky.social and @lostintheswarm.bsky.social ✨
Link to the paper here: doi.org/10.1111/2041...

Made possible by an @asab.org Conference Attendance Grant 🥰🙏

YouTube video by 2swap Adventures in State Space

What makes a puzzle hard?

I found this video delightful.

🧠 Want to integrate cultural evolution into your course using award winning materials created by the field's experts, and get paid $2000 to do it? 💵

🚨 The Cultural Evolution Society is seeking applications for the ACE Teaching Innovation Awards.

🔖 Apply here: vuw.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...

If you hate statistics like I do, then you'll love my free lectures. Putting science before statistics, 20 lectures from basics of inference & causal modeling to multilevel models & dynamic state space models. It's all free, made with love and sympathy. 🧪 #stats www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...

No, blue whales aren't going silent off California. Here's why. Reports of blue whales going silent off California don't reflect the findings of a recent study.

No, blue whales aren't going silent off California. Here's why. | When asked whether the blue whales have gone silent since 2021, he replied: "Nope."

Auditory object representation in the bat hippocampus Krishna et al. identify two populations of CA1 neurons that encode allocentric object location or egocentric object distance but only when bats actively track a moving target using echolocation. These...

Super excited to share that the first work from my PhD is out in @currentbiology.bsky.social

www.cell.com/current-biol...

We tackle two fundamental questions:
1) How does the brain create a cognitive map solely using auditory information?
2)How does the hippocampus represent a moving object?

Superefficient teamwork in weaver ants / Curr. Biol., Aug. 12, 2025 (Vol. 35, Issue 17) Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.

In humans, bigger teams often mean less effort per person — the #Ringelmann effect. Weaver #ants 🐜 flip the script: #teamwork makes them superefficient!

Video + paper out now in Current Biology!
@cellpress.bsky.social

tinyurl.com/44yrvp6m
tinyurl.com/3jnnevfn

As human teams get bigger, they get less efficient. But these ants have found a solution Not only are weaver ants not plagued by a drop in teamwork efficiency, but they’re actually ‘superefficient’.

Here's a quick explainer that Dan and I wrote for our paper out today in Current Biology (tinyurl.com/3jnnevfn) on weaver ant pulling chains.

theconversation.com/as-human-tea... via @ConversationEDU

RFK Jr. in interview with Scripps News: ‘Trusting the experts is not science’ HHS Secretary RFK Jr. sat down with Scripps News for a wide-ranging interview, discussing mRNA vaccine funding policy changes and a recent shooting at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

1. "'Trusting the experts is not a feature of either a science or democracy," Kennedy said."

It's literally a vital feature of both science and of representative democracy.

I've written a fair bit about trust in expertise as a vital mechanism in the collective epistemology of science.

New paper out!
We found that in pipistrelle bats, social vocalizations carry a stronger phylogenetic signal than echolocation calls, suggesting the former evolve more slowly, while the latter remains flexible and shaped by the environment.
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

An illustration of the inferred living conditions of a population of Nucleospira calypta in its natural habitat. CREDIT: Chao Tan and Bing Huang

The brachiopod Nucleospira calypta lived on the sea floor around 436 million years ago in a checkerboard pattern determined by the length of its setae--bristle-like appendages likely used for feeding or defense. In PNAS: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

This week on the @science.org podcast: Why anteaters keep evolving w/ @david-grimm.bsky.social, and how giant whales get enough food to live w/ Ashley Blawas LISTEN HERE:

www.science.org/content/podc...

A NINNY, AN IDIOT AND AN ECONOMIC THEORIST Ariel Rubinstein

"...a model should be judged by criteria akin to those applied to stories, such as aesthetics, originality, and relevance. It does not require that a model have predictive power, nor that it be subjected to empirical testing. Essentially, crafting a compelling model is an art rather than a science."

🐒🕸️ New preprint! Confused about how to model animal social networks?

ASNA can be confusing—but also full of opportunity. We break down 5 common misunderstandings in animal social network analysis and share solutions from behavioural ecology, anthro, stats, & network science. Hope it helps!

A 🧵