“By analyzing the chamber’s composition and the larvae it harbors, the team challenges the long-held notion that royal jelly alone — the queen-making food fed to select larvae — makes a queen.”
#scicomm
www.sciencenews.org/article/quee...
🧪 🐝 🐙
“The fresh fecal smell is a sign of science. The pellets contain fragments of DNA from the squirrels’ diet that paint a picture of the animals’ ecosystems in new detail”
#scicomm
#sensoryecology
#paleoecology
www.sciencenews.org/article/froz...
🧪 🐿️ 🦊
“Homing pigeons don’t rely on gut instinct to return to the roost. But a nearby organ — the liver — might point the way. White blood cells in the birds’ livers accumulate iron and act as an internal compass when clouds block the sun...”
#scicomm
www.sciencenews.org/article/pige...
🧪 🕊️ 🦉 🧲
Very interesting intersection of natural history, sensory and behavioural ecology! Also owls!
How animals navigate by Earth's magnetic field is hotly debated. New research in pigeons points to iron-laden liver immune cells as the compass.
A *superb* book on this topic, published in 2022 by Princeton University Press…
The Mind of a Bee, by Lars Chittka @larschittka.bsky.social, professor of sensory and behavioural ecology at Queen Mary University, London.
Have read it twice, it’s so damn fascinating.
Sensory Ecology Lab
#jobalert
Postdoc position in rooting motivation in pigs and nursing vocalisations in sows
Centre for Proper Housing (FSVO), Switzerland
More information:
www.applied-ethology.org/Postdoctoral...
Sensory Ecology Lab
Sensory Ecology Lab
Old age is a risk factor for falling. The elderly must exert more conscious effort to maintain balance than younger people, according to a study in which participants balanced on force-sensing plates while their brain activity was recorded. In PNAS: https://ow.ly/yuo250Z5Fvo
Josh Arbon
Vocal coordination and conflict avoidance shape fission-fusion dynamics in white-nosed coatis https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.05.26.727854v1
Visual cues elicit differential aggression towards female and female mimics in the corkwing wrasse
#Fish #VisualMimicry #AlternativeReproductiveTactics
doi.org/10.1093/behe...
