Профиль

1/ The world's songbirds sing in just 8 basic sounds. And where a bird lives decides which ones it uses. My first PhD paper is out now in @science.org (www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aee6239) Here is what we found:

Big congrats to @morfjoe.bsky.social on this exciting new paper in Science Advances! We provide evidence that larger flocks of migratory birds navigate more accurately toward their target direction than smaller ones

The University of Exeter have announced a programme of academic staff cuts, including all of www.exeter.ac.uk/research/gro... Sign the open letter of support at docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F... @crab-exeter.bsky.social

Really pleased to see this paper out! We show that collective intelligence emerges in wild birds, using radar traces from flocks of migratory hirundines. Many wild social animals might benefit from similar processes, but we could also see Allee effects as migratory populations decline.

The WISDOM OF CROWDS emerges in flocks of thousands of migrating songbirds! Excited to share our work published by @aaas.org in Science Advances! doi.org/10.1126/scia...

Professor Tim Coulson FRS is elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. He is a biologist working at the interface of ecology and evolution, developing theory to explore how ecological change influences evolution, and vice versa. #RSFellows https://royalsociety.org/people/timothy-coulson-9070/

Congratulations to Sophus zu Ermgassen, who's been listed on the ENDS Power List 2026! Sophus is listed in the Academics category, with his work mentioned as being highly influential in shaping environmental policy not just domestically, but also globally 👇

First paper, first post 🥳 Many congrats to Liliana Silva and everyone involved! Every behavioural ecologist who’s stared at hours of video footage should check this out 👀 Very proud that the Wytham Tits are part of this!! 🐥🐣 @egioxford.bsky.social

🥳 New paper alert 🥳 The first of the data chapters from my DPhil, and the works from my first few field seasons on Skomer, is out! "Shearwaters make efficient navigational decisions, even at very fine scales" - doi.org/10.1242/jeb.... A huge thank you to everyone involved 🩵

I'm a data scientist @ourworldindata.org and I need help from a botanist or someone local to Kyoto, Japan! 🌸 We present one of the world’s longest climate records: 1,200 years of peak cherry blossom dates in Kyoto. The researcher who maintained it, Prof. Yasuyuki Aono, sadly passed away last year.

1/25 New paper out in PNAS! We show that the fitness costs of reproductive specialization, where somatic cells give up reproduction, scale inversely with organism size. Larger organisms can afford far more soma, removing a key barrier to multicellular complexity.

Join me & @olliepadget.bsky.social at @livuninews.bsky.social! #postdoc #seabird movement & navigation in response to environmental cues @ukri.org. Developing new loggers w/ micro-engineers & computer scientists @yorkuniversity.bsky.social. Job tinyurl.com/2zuzktv5 Press release tinyurl.com/2zuzktv5

Migrated to Bluesky as I'm excited to share our new paper on collective route memories in homing pigeons: rdcu.be/e73Qk We found flocks remembered old routes better than pigeons flying alone, likely because different birds remembered different parts of the route!

Does being in a collective buffer against individual forgetting, when it comes to navigation? New paper by Joe Morford: we find that collectives of homing pigeons remember their routes better than individuals @dorabiro.bsky.social @richardpmann.bsky.social Thanks to @templetonworld.bsky.social !

Collective wisdom emerges in pigeons through forgetting randomly-different information over time doi.org/10.1038/s415...

So, groups of animals are better at remembering what they’ve learned than lone individuals because they forget independently, generating complementary memories of the task solution!

But despite this improvement in recapitulation of the learned route, we saw no improvement in homing efficiency for pairs during testing - collective memory did not translate into collective intelligence. We suspect that with a longer period of forgetting, this association might emerge.

This suggests that collective memory emerges not just through sampling but through complementary memories, like a many wrongs effect.

After this period of forgetting, we tested them either in pairs again, or solo. We found that pigeons released in pairs took routes much closer to their original training routes ✅ and this effect appeared larger than expected from the solo route of the best performing partner 🥇

Groups of homing pigeons 🐦🐦 learn idiosyncratic routes from release sites and faithfully recapitulate these, even when released alone 🐦 We trained pigeons in pairs until they formed consistent routes, then stopped releasing them at those sites for a few months to let them forget their route ❌🧠