Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Reposted by Eloise Newman

Greg Albery @gfalbery.bsky.social · 6d

I'm v excited to be recruiting a PhD student to work on badger behaviour and ecology! Starting date is March 2026; see the ad here, or message me for more details: www.gregalbery.me/s/March-2026...

10 8

Reposted by Eloise Newman

Gabrielle Davidson @drgdavidson.bsky.social · 10d

📢🚨Please share! We’re hiring! 📢🚨Have a strong interests in wildlife ecology and gut microbiome bioinformatics? 3 year Senior Research Associate for NERC Pushing the Frontiers grant. Apply here: vacancies.uea.ac.uk/vacancies/18.... Informal enquiries welcome! drgldavidson.github.io/ACMEresearch

2 26 23

Eloise Newman @eloisenewman.bsky.social · 24d

Beautiful rainbow from the new Life and Mind Building @biology.ox.ac.uk - it’s been great moving in ☺️

View from window of a road with a Victorian building behind it. The sky is grey blue with a rainbow arcing across

1

Reposted by Eloise Newman

Ben Sheldon @sheldonbirds.bsky.social · 24d

Come and work with us! Three new academic posts (including Animal Behaviour) and superb facilities in the new Life & Mind Building

Oxford Biology @biology.ox.ac.uk · 25d

Oxford Biology is growing 📢

We’re appointing 3 Associate Professors in:
🌱 Plant Sciences
🦉 Animal Behaviour
🔬 Molecular Cell Biology

3 fields. 3 opportunities. One new home for Oxford Biology.

Learn more 👉 bit.ly/41S2Tc7
Apply now 👉 bit.ly/488CNW3

Photo showing the inside atrium of the new Life and Mind Building

2 31 31

Reposted by Eloise Newman

Oxford Clarion @oxfordclarion.bsky.social · 24d

Water quality at Wolvercote Mill Stream is the worst since records began, according to Environment Agency testing. As a designated bathing site, water is tested for e. coli and intestinal enterococci which usually get into water from sewage & animal manure.
environment.data.gov.uk/bwq/profiles...

Graphs showing e coli and Intestinal enterococci.

Wolvercote Mill Stream, (Steve Daniels, geograph CC BY-SA 2.0)

4 5 10

Reposted by Eloise Newman

Thomas Lin Pedersen @thomasp85.com · 29d

I am beyond excited to announce that ggplot2 4.0.0 has just landed on CRAN.

It's not every day we have a new major #ggplot2 release but it is a fitting 18 year birthday present for the package.

Get an overview of the release in this blog post and be on the lookout for more in-depth posts #rstats

ggplot2 4.0.0

A new major version of ggplot2 has been released on CRAN. Find out what is new here.

www.tidyverse.org

9 280 850

Reposted by Eloise Newman

Ben Kawam @benkawam.bsky.social · Sep 4

Are you studying animal sociality? Confused about the "non-independence" of social network data: what on earth are they? are they threatening your results? should you attempt to get rid of them?

A thread summarising a part of our new paper (ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v...).

Five misunderstandings in animal social network analysis

ecoevorxiv.org

1 11 19

Reposted by Eloise Newman

Greg Albery @gfalbery.bsky.social · Sep 8

Celebrating the publication of our big collaborative spatial-social meta-analysis of density-dependent transmission effects, out now in Nature Eco Evo! doi.org/10.1038/s415... (or rdcu.be/eD6eB)

1 22 43

Reposted by Eloise Newman

Arne Elofsson @bioinfo.se · Sep 3

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

‘Almost unimaginable’: these ants are different species but share a mother

Ant queens of one species clone ants of another to create hybrid workers that do their bidding.

www.nature.com

10 25

Reposted by Eloise Newman

Silu Wang (she/her)🇨🇦 @siluwang.bsky.social · Aug 30

Why do speciation rates vary across the tree of life?
Some of the best yet most underappreciated places for this investigation are natural hybrid zones.
This preprint takes you to the hybrid zones in the origin of species to find a clue. 👉 shorturl.at/N7FXE
#Speciation #Evolution #hybridization

2 53 110

Reposted by Eloise Newman

Kelly S. O'Donnell @kellyodonn.bsky.social · Aug 30

"It took her nearly two decades to find a permanent academic position. She found occasional work as a visiting professor, filling in for someone on leave for a year or two. She earned grants to fund her research... but she was often living on unemployment benefits"

www.nytimes.com/2025/08/29/s...

Margaret W. Rossiter, 81, Dies; Wrote Women Scientists Into History

www.nytimes.com

2 150 390

Reposted by Eloise Newman

Lauren Brent @ljnbrent.bsky.social · Aug 31

Survey alert! If you're a social behavioural ecologist, please fill in our survey aimed at gauging interest in, barriers and solutions to, comparative social behaviour research. Thanks! forms.gle/KZJDMtLCJhvY...

5 4

Reposted by Eloise Newman

Delphine De Moor @delphinedemoor.bsky.social · Aug 29

Hannah Lemon gave a very clear and interesting talk about social inheritance of social relationships from mothers to their daughters and sons (to a lesser extent) in the Rum red deer @rumdeerresearch.bsky.social.

@behaviour2025.bsky.social @asab.org

Hannah Lemon presenting a slide showing networks of mothers and their offspring, where offspring inherited some of the social partners of the mother

5 23

Reposted by Eloise Newman

Theresa Burt @burt15theresa.bsky.social · Aug 26

Fantastic new job, advert now live - Associate Professor in Animal Behaviour, Dept Biology, Oxford. Closing date 8th Oct. Come and join us!
my.corehr.com/pls/uoxrecru...

Job Details

my.corehr.com

16 17

Reposted by Eloise Newman

Delphine De Moor @delphinedemoor.bsky.social · Aug 27

@devisatarkar.bsky.social gave beautiful talk on the extent to which social network traits are heritable vs. shaped by the spatial & social environment at birth using long-term data on blue tits 🐣🧬
@behaviour2025.bsky.social @asab.org

1 8 18

Reposted by Eloise Newman

Faculty of Biological Sciences @bioscienceleeds.bsky.social · Aug 21

Whoever heard of birds splitting up?

A new study from @biology.ox.ac.uk and Leeds researcher Dr Josh Firth reveals wild great tits show signs of 'divorce' months before breeding season.

🔎 Vital clues to social relationships in not just birds, but other species too.

bit.ly/4fLH3Nb @ox.ac.uk

Researchers uncover social clues to bird 'divorce'

Wild great tits exhibit clear behaviours signalling ‘divorce’ long before the breeding season, according to a study by researchers from the Universities of Oxford and Leeds.

bit.ly

3 4

Reposted by Eloise Newman

Flo Débarre @flodebarre.bsky.social · Aug 22

Final words of the last #ESEB2025 plenary by @jmappes.bsky.social:
"Science moves forward when we keep both our curiosity and our humility"

Photo of the final slide of J Mappes's plenary at ESEB
Text on the slide:
Take-home
Natural history matters
Ecological reality is complex
Fresh ideas matter
Be ready to reject your favourite hypothesis
Science moves forward when we keep both our curiosity and our humility

1 14 52

Eloise Newman @eloisenewman.bsky.social · Aug 22

Thank you so much! Hoping to get a preprint out this autumn before the end of the year ☺️🤞

Samuele Ramellini @sramellini.bsky.social · Aug 18

Same here! Seems really cool and interesting!

1

Eloise Newman @eloisenewman.bsky.social · Aug 18

Excited to be at ESEB 2025 in Barcelona!

Presenting a poster on my first chapter (with my supervisors Josh Firth and Sarah Knowles) today between 5-7 pm, so come along say hi! Happy to chat about the friendship paradox and animal social networks ☺️ @eseb2025.bsky.social

2 2 26

Reposted by Eloise Newman

Felix Baier @felixbaier.bsky.social · Jul 23

🚨Very happy that my PhD work is now out in @nature.com!

We discovered that evolution, by acting in the midbrain, shifted the threshold to escape in Peromyscus mice, to fine-tune defensive strategies in different environments

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

This was a truly collaborative effort! 🧵⬇️

26 100 470

Reposted by Eloise Newman

Patrick Lewin @plewin.bsky.social · Jul 22

Ever wondered how animals know where they are? Or how they find where they need to be?

The answer is that they have maps and compasses built into their heads! Excited to see this new review of map-and-compass navigation led by Joe Morford out in Animal Behaviour @asab.org

doi.org/10.1016/j.an...

Image description: figure from review titled Map and compass navigation: the mechanism and ontogeny of animal maps. The figure shows how environmental cues can vary in predictable gradients through space, generating unique cue combinations at each location. The second part of this figure shows how animals may respond to these cue combinations, either treating them as discrete cue-location associations, or as continuous gradients. These differences may lead to differences in navigational strategies and performance.

18 39

Reposted by Eloise Newman

Mark A. Hanson @hansonmark.bsky.social · Jul 10

The "reproducibility crisis" in science constantly makes headlines. Repro efforts are often limited. What if you could assess reproducibility of an entire field?

That's what @brunolemaitre.bsky.social et al. have done. Fly immunity is highly replicable & offers lessons for #metascience

A 🧵 1/n

10 170 320

Reposted by Eloise Newman

Daniel Bolnick @danielbolnick.bsky.social · Jul 8

New paper in Evolution Letters @evolletters.bsky.social by an undergrad in my lab!
academic.oup.com/evlett/advan...
We modeled eco-evo dynamics of infection & immunity and then analyzed 50 years of data from stickleback & tapeworms (thanks to museum samples!)

Dynamics of infection and immunity over 50 years as marine stickleback adapt to freshwater

Abstract. When a species colonizes a new environment, it may encounter new parasites to which its immune system is poorly adapted. After an initial spike i

academic.oup.com

2 16 59

Reposted by Eloise Newman

Andrea Estandía @andreaestandia.bsky.social · Jul 2

New preprint: Using pedigree data + genomics from 2,684 great tits in Wytham Woods, we explore spatial genetic structure and the role of dispersal, population turnover and immigration 🐦 With @sheldonbirds.bsky.social @nilomr.bsky.social @jon-slate.bsky.social

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

1 14 63

Reposted by Eloise Newman

Luca Hahn @lucahahn.bsky.social · Jun 27

In our new paper we discuss the coevolution of cognition and sociality (link: royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...). It was a pleasure to work on this project with Andoni Sergiou, @josharbon.bsky.social, @inesfuertbauer.bsky.social, @shoalgroup.bsky.social, and @cornishjackdaws.bsky.social!

1 17 45