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Luke Rendell

@lrendell.bsky.social

2.1K followers 940 following 150 posts

Reader in Biology @_SMRU_ @SchoolofBiology @univofstandrews. Ocean Yachtmaster for hire! Marine conservation, cetacean & fish behaviour, cultural evolution. He/him. Thalassophile. Sailor. #Fife https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/biology/people/ler4

www.st-andrews.ac.uk

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Reposted by Luke Rendell

Melissa Ramsay @melissa-e-ramsay.bsky.social · Aug 28

After almost a year(!!) of my PhD, I am excited to start my 3-month placement at @rothamsted.bsky.social 🌱 I shall miss this lovely group at St Andrews @animalsdoingstuff.bsky.social @mikemwebster.bsky.social @lrendell.bsky.social but I'm sure I'll be back to the sea before I know it! 🌊🐟🦀

Five members of "team fish" in our waders and woolly hats in front of the main rockpool, with a grey sky behind us.

Selfie on a sailboat

Three members of "team fish" wading into a large rockpool carrying rigs and floats for data collection, with a blue sky and fluffy white clouds

Luke Rendell @lrendell.bsky.social · Aug 27

File under "no s**t Sherlock" 🙄

Research Professional News @resprofnews.bsky.social · Aug 26

University efficiency drives may have opposite effect, study finds.

The administrative burden in Australian universities is most keenly felt by teaching and research staff, according to a study from the University of Melbourne’s faculty of education.
www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-aust...

University efficiency drives may have opposite effect, study finds - Research Professional News

Teaching and research staff say reforms mean more red tape for them, Australian survey reports

www.researchprofessionalnews.com

Luke Rendell @lrendell.bsky.social · Aug 19

And always with r/v Balaena a bit of pure sailing...⛵ #sailing

Luke Rendell @lrendell.bsky.social · Aug 19

Prima facie evidence of lobtailing as a mobbing/gathering/social signal in this species 🤔🐋🦑🧪

Luke Rendell @lrendell.bsky.social · Aug 19

Northern bottlenose are such a charming cetacean, vaguely absurd looking, but consistently showing a bold curiosity toward our vessel (and it's towed hydrophone!)

Luke Rendell @lrendell.bsky.social · Aug 19

our operating area...

Luke Rendell @lrendell.bsky.social · Aug 19

Better late than never but had such a great time last month helping Whitehead lab collect body condition and photo id on northern bottlenose whales in the Gully MPA - see 🧵 for cool whale videos!🐳🦑⛵

Me at the navigation/science station on r/v Balaena with galley also in view

Me in r/v Baleana's cockpit with sunset and field crew behind

Me and whole crew for 2 weeks in cockpit of r/v Balaena

Two fieldworkers on the bow of r/v Balaena can no longer take ID shorts because northern bottlenose whales are too close!

Luke Rendell @lrendell.bsky.social · Aug 17

TACO Don is selling Ukraine down the river. Time for UK/EU and it's citizens to step up, good to see this effort! Please consider donating to Come Back Alive savelife.in.ua/en/donate-en...

www.theguardian.com/world/2025/a...

UK and EU at Zelenskyy’s side in Washington for meeting with Trump

Emmanuel Macron, Friedrich Merz and others will aim to push back against ceding of Ukraine territory in ‘peace plan’

www.theguardian.com

Reposted by Luke Rendell

Ellen Garland @ellengarland.bsky.social · Aug 14

Spotting whales for the boat team at the lighthouse in the Southern Lagoon, New Caledonia 🐳 🎶 @solenederville.bsky.social @francae.bsky.social @seamammalresearch.bsky.social @uniofstandrews.bsky.social @entropie-marinelab.bsky.social

Reposted by Luke Rendell

Ellen Garland @ellengarland.bsky.social · Aug 11

Humpback whale fieldwork 2025: the season is well underway in the Southern Lagoon, New Caledonia @solenederville.bsky.social @seamammalresearch.bsky.social @uniofstandrews.bsky.social @entropie-marinelab.bsky.social @francae.bsky.social

Sitting on the side of our research boat

Reposted by Luke Rendell

Tim Waring @twaring.bsky.social · Jun 9

New 2 year post-doc position on cultural adaptation in complex environmental management.

Post-Doctoral Position on Cultural Adaptation in Forest Management

The University of Maine seeks a post-doctoral researcher for a two-year project on human cultural adaptation in forest management, requiring a strong quantitative background and experience in modeling.

Reposted by Luke Rendell

Peter Corkeron @petercorkeron.bsky.social · Jul 9

New paper
Exploring the biodiversity of cetacean communities along the western North Atlantic Ocean shelf-break
led by Samara Haver.

One finding:
"beaked whale species [were] the most significant driver of differences among cetacean communities"
🐳🌍🦑🧪
royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

From the figure legend:
Figure 4. Conditional inference tree (Ctree) showing the partitioning effect of the presence of certain species (number of days per month) across 10 sites in the North Atlantic. Each Ctree node was restricted to a minimum sum of 60 weights and exceedance of a 0.95 test statistic. The size of the Ctree (depth) was not restricted, but the minimum sum of weights for each terminal node (numbered 1−9) was limited to 15. Each colour-coded site is labelled in the legend and ordered from north to south in order to latitude with a spectrum of colours from cool (blue) to warm (red). Beaked whale species represented all inner nodes except for one fourth tier node, which was sperm whales.

Luke Rendell @lrendell.bsky.social · Jul 3

🐳

Luke Rendell @lrendell.bsky.social · Jul 3

And for those understandbly reluctant to click on the Mail, here too (side note I do have a mildly nonstandard surname but two different misspellings in the same article is a new personal best 🤣 Rendell 1-0 Proofreaders) :

Dr Luke Rendel, a marine biologist at the University of St Andrews, calls this a 'poor cover for harassing animals in the wild'. Dr Rendle adds that the researchers also made 'no quantification of this behaviour and little attempt to do the hard work analyses that might give us some better insights as to why they do it.'
Instead, Dr Rendle points out that this paper is more concerned with arguing that it is legitimate to keep orcas in captivity and observe them from tourist boats.

However, Dr Rendle argues that even genuine scientific observations can 'never be a justification for captivity for a species like this'.
Dr Rendle says: 'Make no mistake, this is a for-profit business trying to obscure the ethical issues with its existence by providing really quite lame studies like this.'

'If animals are in captivity for other reasons, it can be better to learn something from them while they are there, but it can never be a justification for captivity for a species like this – everything we learn about them in captivity tells us more and more that they never should be there.'

Luke Rendell @lrendell.bsky.social · Jul 3

Orca snogging?! Wild tongues!? 🤭🙄 Tongue nibbling is a fascinating behaviour, but make no mistake, this paper is a sordid piece of propaganda attempting to sanitise two ethically dubious ways of economically exploiting these animals - spicy opinions here: www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/...

Orcas spotted SNOGGING for the first time - and they even use tongues

A surprising new study now shows that orcas have a softer, possibly even romantic, side as they are caught kissing on film for the first time.

www.dailymail.co.uk

Reposted by Luke Rendell

Melissa Ramsay @melissa-e-ramsay.bsky.social · Jun 11

I really enjoyed presenting some preliminary results from my PhD work at the St Andrews Biology PGR conference today! It was great to see all the cool work coming out of our community as well 🦀🐟🔊 (thanks to @mikemwebster.bsky.social and @lrendell.bsky.social as always)

A picture of me standing in front of my slide showing preliminary results from my first PhD studies.

Reposted by Luke Rendell

Marine Geospatial Ecology Lab @duke-mgel.bsky.social · Jun 4

Huge shoutout to @anacanadas.bsky.social and the MGEL team for this ambitious effort!
A massive collaborative dataset, rigorous modeling & timely insight into Mediterranean cetaceans—especially sperm whales.

Incredible work presented at #ECSconference2025 🐋🧪
#MarineConservation #MGEL #OceanScience

Luke Rendell @lrendell.bsky.social · May 15

Super complex but important work by @anacanadas.bsky.social who modelled Mediterranean cetacean abundance using multiple data sources - estimates of total sperm whale abundance had no upper ci above 5.5k supporting recent 'Endangered' IUCN listing doi.org/10.2305/IUCN... #ECSconference2025 🧪🐋🦑

Ana Cañadas in front of a slide detailing the strengths of her multiple data source modelling approach

Luke Rendell @lrendell.bsky.social · Jun 3

JASA 'Scilight' of @angelaamlin.bsky.social's new paper here: pubs.aip.org/aip/sci/arti... 🐋🦭🦑

Luke Rendell @lrendell.bsky.social · Jun 1

@angelaamlin.bsky.social has joined bluesky! 🚨🐋🦑

Luke Rendell @lrendell.bsky.social · May 29

This work is part of ongoing efforts on monk seal conservation by the Tethys organisation and will form the basis for building detectors to use long term passive monitoring for this species to monitor with minimal impact tethys.org/activities-o...

Mediterranean monk seal - Tethys

Tethys has been contributing to conservation efforts on Mediterranean monk seal by the drafting of the national strategy and action plan in Greece

Luke Rendell @lrendell.bsky.social · May 29

Concurrent UW GoPro footage showed the five most prevalent calls type - croaks, knocks, screams, snorts, and squirts, comprising ∼87% of the high-quality call dataset - being heard while multiple (always multiple) monk seals were in shot socially interacting (video from paper supplementary material)

Luke Rendell @lrendell.bsky.social · May 29

Here's what they sound like (from paper supplementary material) - sound up!

Luke Rendell @lrendell.bsky.social · May 29

Angela analysed 16 days of continuous recordings from a SoundTrap placed outside a cave commonly used by the seals and found 377 bouts of 3442 calls

Spectrogram display showing time/frequency distribution of acoustic energy during a bout of calls identified as monk seal, showing call types croak, knock, scream and snort - the 4 most common

Luke Rendell @lrendell.bsky.social · May 29

New paper 🚨 very excited to see Angela Amlin's first PhD paper confirming the underwater vocal repertoire of Mediterranean monk seals published 🦑🦭🐋 @gordonhastie.bsky.social @joan-gonzalvo.bsky.social @seamammalresearch.bsky.social pubs.aip.org/asa/jasa/art...

Confirmed vocal activity of Mediterranean monk seals in the Inner Ionian Sea Archipelago, Greece

Mediterranean monk seals (Monachus monachus) are the world's rarest seal species, with fewer than 1000 individuals remaining across fragmented subpopulations. M

Luke Rendell @lrendell.bsky.social · May 22

Yes but also even if it had been a high school student, if they're making good points you can't just appeal-to-authority your way out of needing to address those points.... 🙄