Any Ant biologist knows what’s going one here? This ants in my back yard (Edmonton, Canada) are carrying another ant but the carried ant seems to be perfectly fine and the same size.
What would happen if we stuck a stick to the butt of a chicken 🐔?
The surprising answer - we turn it back into a dinosaur 🦖, sort of.
It reverts their locomotion to something similar to a dinosaur . 🧪
Link: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?reqmod=%27b%27&id=10.1371/journal.pone.0088458
Join us in Berlin, 14 - 18 September 2026, to celebrate 100 years of German mammalogy with @mammalbiology.bsky.social.
We'll be hosted by @mfnberlin.bsky.social and the Leibniz Institute for Zoo & Wildlife Research.
Early Bird registration is open until May 31st!
www.mammalian-biology.de/meetings/
This is a pretty concerning graph! Hell's aquarium indeed.
The concise history of modeling character evolution. Handy timeline.
academic.oup.com/sysbio/advan...
🧪 #EvoBio #Paleobio
🎉🦜NEW PAPER ALERT 🦜🎉
Which social learning biases underly the acquisition of novel food in wild parrots ?
We (@lucymaplin.bsky.social, @bjjbarrett.bsky.social, @sonjawild.bsky.social, @drjohnmartin.bsky.social) presented >700 cockies with a novel, artificial food (🧵1/6)
“Binocular vision emerges from the coordinated development of orbit convergence, eye orientation, and high-acuity retinal specializations”
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
Amazing work from Alfonso Deichler and everyone else on the development of binocular vision in a diurnal rodent, Octodon degus.
Proposed structures/ mechanisms for magnetic sensing in bird (so far):
1) In the beak/ trigeminal Nerve (biogenic magnetite)
2) radical pair-Cryptochrome mediated reaction in the retina
3) The lagena
4) Vestibular canals (electromagnetic induction)
5) Supermagnetic macrophages in the liver.
David Gaboriau
Cristian Gutierrez-Ibañez
Cristian Gutierrez-Ibañez
Julia Penndorf
Asher Elbein
Kai Caspar
Andrej Spiridonov
Video
www.mammalian-biology.de
Annual Meeting of the German Society for Mammalian Biology 100th Anniversary of the DGS Berlin 14 - 18 September 2026
Researchers have identified superparamagnetic macrophages in the livers of rock pigeons to be crucial for magnetic sensing. The finding uncovers an unexpected role for immune cells in sensory perception and may fundamentally change our understanding of animal navigation.
https://scim.ag/4nTQ3nq
Adopting novel food is vital to colonize novel environments, but what is the role of social learning? Study of urban #cockatoos by @clevercockierp.bsky.social shows them to rapidly adopt novel food via #SocialLearning, with juveniles showing conformist preferences @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/4uq6NVq
PLOS Biology
Science Magazine
Hello #world, meet 1,000× Expansion Microscopy.
A small gel would grow to the size of an Olympic swimming pool, while amino-acid-scale distances become visible with ordinary light microscopy.
Led by Helena Hu from @eboyden3.bsky.social's lab, in collab with us.
Story: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
