Will Oestreich

DISI is an outstanding experience! Apply to keep shaping what makes this community so special!!

How and why does cognition vary so greatly between individuals and species? In @natrevbiodiv.nature.com, we propose the "Predatory Intelligence Hypothesis" which posits that the cognitive challenges associated with predator–prey interactions drive a cognitive co-evolutionary arms race

rdcu.be/e5KIj

Humpback whale breaching in front of the New Caledonian coastline.

New paper on age-related reproductive tactics & success in humpback whales, published in Current Biology.🐳🧬
doi.org/10.1016/j.cu...
#marmam @seamammalresearch.bsky.social @uniofstandrews.bsky.social @ellengarland.bsky.social @emma-carroll.bsky.social @clairenea.bsky.social @lrendell.bsky.social 1/7

Hiring for 3 positions: Research Assistant, Field Research Coordinator, and Postdoc I am looking to hire 3 people into my lab this year. I am still doing the paperwork to get the jobs officially posted but I want to send the word out and screen potential applications right away. R…

I am hiring a research assistant (vampire bats), a Panama fieldwork coordinator (vampire bats), and also considering postdoc apps (social behavior, any species): socialbat.org/2026/02/19/h...

Yes! That's part of what makes this work so exciting to me: using social information in (broadly-defined) foraging decisions is such a familiar experience for almost all humans. Super exciting to see why and how this is the case demonstrated so clearly in the wild.

but ya, they do

cognitive dissonance (2026)

This paper is amazing, an early fav of mine in 2026. But who "previously thought [humans] to be solitary decision makers"? Not the authors of this (again, outstanding!) study. From the intro of their structured abstract: "Foraging decisions... are, therefore, likely influenced by social information"

Fantastic opportunity to work with us at Shark Bay Dolphin Research 👇🏻

I love the ocean

Check out our paper which came out last year
www.cell.com/current-biol...

We understand a great deal about how and why cooperation evolves, but what about its long-term consequences?

Great to see our new review on this out now in @asn-amnat.bsky.social!

I love the ocean

On Brian Cantwell Smith and the Promise of AI Today I had the bittersweet pleasure of participating in a symposium honoring the late philosopher Brian Cantwell Smith, a good friend whom I’d known for over 30 years.

I wrote about the late philosopher Brian Cantwell Smith, and his profound thinking about AI and the nature of intelligence.

aiguide.substack.com/p/on-brian-c...

A photo I took in Monterey Bay was on the cover of @behavecol.bsky.social in late 2025! Killer whales are 1 of many case studies explored in our paper "Integrating space, time, and culture in animal conservation practice". tinyurl.com/2pnx2k36 Excited about more ongoing culture + ecology work...

Basque Country, Feb 2026

Very happy to see our ice-fishing paper on the cover of @science.org this week! 🎣🎉

We tracked large groups of Finnish competitive ice-fishers to study how social foragers use social information when searching for resources. 🐟

Link: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... (contact me for open access)

Collective Science to Inform Global Ocean Protections Signatories are poised to ratify the UN High Seas Treaty, providing a legal mechanism to create protected areas in our greatest global commons. Robust, publicly accessible biodiversity data is needed...

The High Seas Treaty enters into force tomorrow! What does this mean for our planet's largest living space? The influence of this agreement depends on humanity's collective capacity to observe, understand, and steward the open and deep ocean. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Looking forward to reading this! I'm lucky to be making a small contribution to the volume: a piece discussing the unique perspectives bio-logging has provided on blue whales' lives. Can't wait to learn from the rest of the articles as well!

🧪New preprint! tinyurl.com/mr7km2pv

When & why do predators share social information? Blue whales produce foraging calls when prey (krill) are abundant & dense, conditions arising from physical oceanographic forcing across temporal scales. Variation in ocean physics shapes blue whale communication!

This work was made possible by an incredible team at @mbarinews.bsky.social. Eager to discuss this work and follow-up on the new questions this research raises!

Broader takeaways:
Biophysical coupling is a foundational concept in the ecology of the pelagic ocean. We demonstrate that this biophysical coupling extends to and shapes predator communication. We discuss how these findings yield insight into the ecological drivers of social information use.

Takeaway specific to blue whale foraging:
Blue whales’ widely propagating calls function as reliable social indicators of patch quality in their vast, dynamic pelagic habitat.

🧪New preprint! tinyurl.com/mr7km2pv

When & why do predators share social information? Blue whales produce foraging calls when prey (krill) are abundant & dense, conditions arising from physical oceanographic forcing across temporal scales. Variation in ocean physics shapes blue whale communication!

Pervasive loose sociality can drive demographic Allee effects Sociality can, in theory, lead to positive relationships between population density and per capita growth rates (demographic Allee effects), but evidence of such relationships remains rare. Here, we consider the demographic consequences of sociality, highlight a historic bias favoring studies of species that socialize in relatively fixed groups, and present evidence that ‘loose sociality’, whereby individuals do not form fixed groups, could be a more likely driver of Allee effects. We show that loose sociality can drive Allee effects if local density increases with population density, that this condition could be widespread in the animal kingdom, and that there are measurable traits that can determine a species’ susceptibility to such socially-driven population collapse.

Online now: Pervasive loose sociality can drive demographic Allee effects

big ol' blue

INVITED IDEA:
Integrating space, time, and culture in animal conservation practice
#AnimalBehavior #AnimalCulture #ConservationInterventions

doi.org/10.1093/behe...

ShoalBase | Join, Explore, Contribute Now ShoalBase offers a global database on fish social behaviour, supporting research, conservation, and ecology through community contributions and visual data mapping.

🧵1/9 There are 35,000+ fish species, but we have formal social-behaviour classifications for a tiny fraction. Most knowledge lives in the experience of researchers, fishers, divers, aquarists, naturalists, and Indigenous communities, but almost none of it is centralised. So we built ShoalBase.org.

Great presentation today by Melissa Chapman on 'Designing equitable strategies to meet global conservation and restoration targets' in the IED Seminar at ETH Zürich @milliechapman.bsky.social @usyseth.bsky.social

Homepage Environmental Policy Lab: epl.ethz.ch

Final version is now online and open access!

"Integrating space, time, and culture in animal conservation practice"

w/ Dawn Barlow & @taylorhersh.bsky.social

🧪