Soay Sheep Project

Today at #bes2025 we have @elliswiersma.bsky.social talking about breeding phenology at 11:30, @mattjsilk.bsky.social presenting the benefits of sociality at 12:30 and @barnardlucy.bsky.social presenting a poster on epigenetic ageing (B17.16)

Sheepies are at @britishecologicalsociety.org ! Kicking off today we have Gina and Lizzie presenting their posters on immune trait variation (A17.3) and early life conditions (A17.13)

Congratulations Josephine!

A photo of a heard of 13 Soay sheep on Flat Holm Island, Wales. The sheep are clustered close together, and are a mixture of dark brown and light colors.

An early-life survival and reproductive trade-off shapes selection on body size
doi.org/10.1093/evle...

Now in @evolletters.bsky.social by Maria João Janeiro et al.
📷: Sam Whitfield

Announcing our Tup of the Trip! DR093 weighed in at 42kg he is our heaviest tup since 2021 and the 10th heaviest November measurement ever. Safe to say that great condition showed, we observed him in 17 consorts over the month 😍🔭🐏

Foggy weather has grounded our field team. Instead we are doing an ask the researcher over on our instagram soaysheep. Head over there to join in! 🔭🐑

We’ve got snow! Good thing the sheep are all wrapped up in their woolly jackets 🔭🐑

Delighted to receive this late season record of a 1cy Ring-necked Duck on #StKilda yesterday from @soaysheep.bsky.social researcher Xavier Bal. A 2nd island record after the first in 2000!
Thanks for this fab 📷 @barnardlucy.bsky.social 🙂
@birdguides.bsky.social
@hebridesbirds.bsky.social

Census 6 completed! The tups are really starting to size each other up now, either guarding males or hanging around in groups like this particularly large one

Safe to say the sheepies are hiding inside a lot of today 🔭🐑

Back out counting sheep! 🔭🐑 @soaysheep.bsky.social

And to round off the Sheepie presence at @eseb2025.bsky.social we had a full house for Lizy giving a talk on the missing fraction problem! Thanks for having us Barcelona!

📜🐏Sheepies at @eseb2025.bsky.social! Some of our PhD students are presenting their work in tonight’s poster session. Check them out here: @barnardlucy.bsky.social on epigenetics #8, @lizziedrake.bsky.social and sex specific senescence #10, and @elliswiersma.bsky.social with breeding phenology #350

🔭🐑 Our summer field team have been busy beavering away and have completed their 10 censuses of the village bay population (picured). Over ten days a team of three will go out and count all the sheep in this area, tagged and untagged, so we know who is where and who they are grouping with.

T-helper cell responses in wild Soay sheep are repeatable, positively correlated, and linked to resistance against helminths and coccidia, challenging assumptions about Th1/Th2 trade-offs in natural settings.

📖 Read more: https://bit.ly/3GCm0PN

#VeterinaryImmunology

A blue test tube rack filled with numbered tubes. Next to it is a pipette and papers.

💻🐑 Update! Back on the mainland our team at @sheffielduni.bsky.social have been beavering away and have finished extracting DNA and aligning over 1000 whole sheep genomes as part of an exciting new project. Keep an eye out for more as the work progresses.

🔭🐑 Check it out! With the lambing team back on the mainland have a look at the stats for the arrival of the Echo Orange cohort of 2025!

.....and follow along with some of the authors here @erinsiracusa.bsky.social @delphinedemoor.bsky.social @gfalbery.bsky.social @elliswiersma.bsky.social @mattjsilk.bsky.social

Environment dependent benefits of sociality in Soay sheep An individual’s social connections have strong effects on fitness. Despite this, there is pronounced among-individual variation in social behaviour. This variation may be maintained if different types...

🖨️🐑 Sneak Peak! A new sheepie pre-print is up on BioRXiv on the Environment dependent benefits of sociality in Soay Sheep. Check it out here doi.org/10.1101/2025... (1/2)

I wonder what way the wind is blowing today ?💨
#sheep #soaysheep

For the feral #sheep on the remote St Kilda islands of #Scotland, long-term success hinges on the first year of life, especially for males. Here are the interesting reasons why: www.pnas.org/post/journal...

#ecology #EvolutionaryEcology #SexualDimorphism #SexualSelection

🔭🐑 The first lambs have arrived, and spot on time from consort sightings in November! Soon village bay will be full of skipping lambs and frantic field workers....🏃‍♀️‍➡️

In sheep, long-term success hinges on the first year of life—especially for males To track lasting impacts in the animals, ecologists investigated weather, parasite load, birth weight and other early-life factors. Image credit: Martin Stoffel.

📰🐑 They found that early-life adversities, eg reduced food resources, harsh winters and low birth weight, can reduce a sheep's ability to reproduce successfully and disadvantaged males in particular. Read a summary by @pnas.org here: www.pnas.org/post/journal...

📰🐑New Paper! PhD researcher @lizziedrake.bsky.social and collaborators looked at how harsh environments in a Soay's first year can have lasting impacts on reproduction and lifespan, and how they differ for males and females.
Read it here: royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

🔭🐑 Saturday saw a big milestone for our field team who completed their 10th and final census of the trip and were rewarded with some glorious weather! Bring on the Lambs...

🔭🐑 Our lambing field season is underway! Last week our lambing team arrived and started out on their first big job of the trip, study area censusing. They will try and spot as many sheep as they can across 10 censuses over the next couple of weeks

📰🐑 We're on the cover! If you haven't already seen it, check out a piece about how our long term field research helps studying ageing in the wild.

Each year’s lambs get a new colour on a six year cycle, prefixed with a letter. Last year’s lambs were Yellow, starting off our “echo” series. Any sheep caught where we don’t know there age are given “unknown purple” tags. 🔭🐑

The combination of different horn shapes, colour morphs and sometimes white patches make every sheep unique to the keen eye. But when we are out censusing it’s much easier to tell them apart by their unique colour tag and number which can be spotted through the teloscope 🔭🐑

Sheepie News! A perspective piece in @natureaging.bsky.social highlights the importance of long term research and how St Kilda Soay sheep project provides a powerful model for understanding why ageing process varies under complex environmental conditions.
Check it out: doi.org/10.1038/s435...
📰🐑