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Reposted by Amanda Melin

Megan Petersdorf @meganpetersdorf.bsky.social · 14d

🚨 New paper! 🚨

🐒 White-faced capuchins experience high rates of infanticide.

🐒 Infanticide is costly to female reproduction.

🐒 Do females exhibit the Bruce effect (termination of pregnancy) to reduce these costs?

🐒 Spoiler: Nope!

Read more ▶️ www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Female capuchins sits on a branch, looking away from the camera. A young capuchin holds onto her back, looking at the camera. Photo: Nick Chapoy

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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...

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Amanda Melin @amelinlab.bsky.social · Aug 30

In our new paper, led by Joelle Hass & with a wonderful collaborative team, we explore the ocular surface microbiome (OSM) of rhesus macaques. Read on to learn how similar their eye bacteria are to ours, and effects of age, sex & living condition.
animalmicrobiome.biomedcentral.com/articles/10....

The ocular surface microbiome of rhesus macaques - Animal Microbiome

Background The ocular surface microbiota (OSM) is important for eye health, and variations in OSM composition have been associated with multiple diseases in humans. Studies of OSM-disease dynamics in ...

animalmicrobiome.biomedcentral.com

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Reposted by Amanda Melin

Animal Behavior Society @animbehsociety.bsky.social · Aug 27

Congrats to Mark Hauber on winning this year's Quest Award for an outstanding seminal contribution! Mark has studied it all but the biggest themes in his work center around understanding brood parasitism and coloration of bird eggs. Richly deserved @thecowbirdlab.bsky.social !

www.cowbirdlab.org

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Animal Behavior Society @animbehsociety.bsky.social · Aug 26

Congrats to newly elected ABS Fellow: @smacklab.bsky.social ! Noah and his team examine how environmental and demographic changes influence physiology and health focusing mostly on primates and our best buds, dogs.

Read more here: smack-lab.com

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Dr Mark E Hauber @thecowbirdlab.bsky.social · Aug 19

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

Leading a lab, and all it entails

A chemist offers actionable leadership advice to principal investigators

www.science.org

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Amanda Melin @amelinlab.bsky.social · Aug 20

Our new paper, led by Nicolas Chapoy and Kathy Jack, shows capuchin alpha males have wider faces and bigger balls. Read on for discussion of trait variation with respect to pre- and post- mating competition! Was a large effort by a great team 😍😎🎉

royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/epdf/10....

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Sensory Ecology Lab @sensoryecology.bsky.social · Aug 19

“People of a remote Amazonian society who learned Spanish as a second language began to interpret colors in a new way, an MIT study has found.”

#scicomm
#language
#colordiscrimination

news.mit.edu/2023/how-blu...
🧪

How “blue” and “green” appeared in a language that didn’t have words for them

A new study suggests the way a language divides up color space can be influenced by contact with other languages. Tsimane’ people who learned Spanish as a second language began to classify blue and gr...

news.mit.edu

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John Hawks @johnhawks.net · Jul 24

A long-form piece in @science.org covers recent research at Kromdraai, Drimolen, and Swartkrans, South Africa—all adding to the record of Early Pleistocene hominins. The article's lede, “Did they meet” is a bit of a distraction: They certainly met somewhere!

www.science.org/content/arti...

Three ancient human relatives once shared the same valley. Did they meet—and compete?

The world’s greatest concentration of ancestral human remains, in South Africa, poses a 2-million-year-old riddle of coexistence

www.science.org

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Todd Oakley @ostratodd.bsky.social · Jul 20

Visual information in the dark: Bioluminescence and perceptual design through evolution - Oakley - Functional Ecology - Wiley Online Library besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Visual information in the dark: Bioluminescence and perceptual design through evolution

Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.

besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com

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Amanda Melin @amelinlab.bsky.social · Jul 16

Stay tuned for more on monkey pee and social olfaction in capuchins in Santa Rosa Costa Rica in coming months! #sensoryecology

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Amanda Melin @amelinlab.bsky.social · Jul 16

Our paper on how capuchin pee smells, and why monkeys might rub it all over their bodies is now out in @royalsociety.org RSOS. Led by Alice Poirier, @nellekulick.bsky.social, & a great team of collaborators, this was a complicated but fascinating project.

royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

Urine washing and urinary odour profiles in relation to dominance rank status in wild male capuchin monkeys (Cebus imitator) | Royal Society Open Science

Urine plays an essential role in mammalian olfactory communication, although its potential role in primates has long been overlooked owing to focus on their visual adaptations for communication. Here,...

royalsocietypublishing.org

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Zoë Goldsborough @zoegoldsborough.bsky.social · May 19

Hot off the press 📣: one of the most surprising and unsettling findings of my PhD. A novel social tradition emerged in the tool-using white-faced capuchins of Jicarón island… abducting and carrying the infants of another species. Thread with gifs, videos, and all the bizarre details 👇

Ecology of Animal Societies @livingingroups.bsky.social · May 19

Humans have many unusual traditions. But did you know animals’ strange behaviors can become culture too? Out now in Current Biology (doi.org/10.1016/j.cu...) we show the rise and spread of a surprising tradition: interspecies infant abduction. Interactive timeline (www.ab.mpg.de/671374) 🧵 (1/12)

An illustration of a white-faced capuchin monkey carrying a howler infant on their back while cracking nuts with a stone

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Dr Christopher Taylor @mimicryin3d.bsky.social · Jul 2

Why do imperfect mimics (such as many hoverflies) exist? We created 3D printed replicas of flies, wasps and our own custom intermediates and then "asked" various predators what they thought of our 3D stimuli. Read all about it here: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Mapping the adaptive landscape of Batesian mimicry using 3D-printed stimuli - Nature

Birds have an excellent ability to learn to discriminate harmless insects from those that they mimic on the basis of subtle differences in appearance.

www.nature.com

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Reposted by Amanda Melin

Cielo De La Rosa @cielodelarosa.bsky.social · Apr 21

Excited to share this new paper on chimpanzee foraging cognition from the Primate Ecology and Molecular Anthropology Lab at UCSC! #PEMALab So proud to have contributed to this awesome project as an undergrad!! #termitefishing

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

Wild chimpanzee termite mound inspections converge with the onset of rain - Scientific Reports

Scientific Reports - Wild chimpanzee termite mound inspections converge with the onset of rain

www.nature.com

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Sensory Ecology Lab @sensoryecology.bsky.social · Apr 28

“Early mammals and their close relatives probably sported dark, drab coats from snout to tail... The monochrome ensembles may have helped ancient mammals blend into their nighttime surroundings and evade predators.”

#scicomm
#sensoryecology
#animalcoloration

www.sciencenews.org/article/dark...
🧪 🦊

Dark coats may have helped the earliest mammals hide from hungry dinosaurs

During the age of dinosaurs, early mammals probably lacked the stripes and spots of their modern relatives, having uniformly dark, drab coats.

www.sciencenews.org

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Amanda Melin @amelinlab.bsky.social · Apr 28

Our results provide insight into relationships among group size, behavior of group members, competition, & potential constraints on max group size in this population

Full link to MS in Behavioral Ecology:

academic.oup.com/beheco/artic...

MS led by Dr Shasta Webb, with many important contributors

Behavioral diversity and agonism are higher in larger groups among wild Costa Rican capuchins

Understanding the costs and benefits of group living, along with the impacts of group size on the behavior, has long interested evolutionary biologists. Le

academic.oup.com

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Amanda Melin @amelinlab.bsky.social · Apr 28

We asked how behavioral diversity & agonistic behaviors relate to group size in wild capuchins. We analyzed >65,000 behavioral scans collected over 15 yrs on 214 capuchins (8 groups) & controlled for # inds sampled. We found behavioral richness, diversity & agonism was higher in larger groups.

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Vivek V. Venkataraman @vivek123.bsky.social · Apr 21

I recently did a thoroughly enjoyable two-part podcast with David Sloan Wilson at ProSocial World (@prosocialworld.bsky.social).

The topic was Hunter-Gatherer Societies, Human Origins, and Modern Democracies.

Feedback welcome!

Hunter-Gatherer Societies, Human Origins, and Modern Democracies with Vivek Venkataraman (Part 1)

YouTube video by ProSocial World

www.youtube.com

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Reposted by Amanda Melin

Anna Bowland @acbowland.bsky.social · Apr 21

Happy to share our new paper 'Wild chimpanzees share fermented fruits' @currentbiology.bsky.social

Thank you to the amazing team. @kjhockings.bsky.social @joanahbessa.bsky.social , @xavh.bsky.social, Marina Ramon, Elena Bersacola, Matthew Carrigan, @amelinlab.bsky.social . @uniexecec.bsky.social

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Amanda Melin @amelinlab.bsky.social · Apr 20

Please enjoy this small photo dump from nearby a fruiting Ficus in the tropical dry forest, Costa Rica

Three guans wait by a ficus for the capuchins to leave

Coati scrounging fallen figs from forest floor

One week old spider monkey watches from safety of mom

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Primate Research and News @ourprimatepast.bsky.social · Mar 12

Analysis of olfactory bulb (OB) size in 181 extant and 41 fossil species reveals that haplorhines have significantly smaller OBs than other primates and Euarchontoglires. The reduction likely began at the crown primate node, with multiple decreases in haplorhines, reflecting parallel evolution:

But how does it smell? An investigation of olfactory bulb size among living and fossil primates and other euarchontoglirans

Analysis of cranial endocast data of 181 extant and 41 fossil species from Euarchontoglires shows that there was a reduction in olfactory bulb size in Crown Primates, but that there were also subsequ...

anatomypubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com

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Dr Mark E Hauber @thecowbirdlab.bsky.social · Mar 26

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

Rapid emergence of latent knowledge in the sensory cortex drives learning - Nature

In mice, learning and performance on an auditory task is driven by higher-order signals in the auditory cortex that are no longer required when the mouse has achieved expert-level performance.

www.nature.com

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Reposted by Amanda Melin

Julie Teichroeb @teichroeb-lab.bsky.social · Mar 25

blog.castac.org/2025/03/foll...
A beautiful, introspective, and philosophical blog post co-authored by my PhD student Virendra Mathur on the complicated politics of studying nonhumans in a human-dominated world.

Following Primates | Platypus

If the langurs moved to the agricultural fields or crossed the village, no data could be collected for a couple hours or more. In those moments, we would either wait, patiently hoping that the langurs...

blog.castac.org

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Amanda Melin @amelinlab.bsky.social · Mar 23

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

Let me know if you want to discuss the variable color vision more. It’s a fascinating topic :)

Fruit scent and observer colour vision shape food-selection strategies in wild capuchin monkeys - Nature Communications

We know little about the relative contributions of visual and olfactory senses for wild, frugivorous mammals. Here, the authors show that in capuchin monkeys, frequency of olfactory evaluation of frui...

www.nature.com

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