Nilo

🚨🚨🚨 Field Assistant positions - four of them!! - working with the long-term Wytham project this coming spring. Details below. Previous year's field team - come and join us! Details below ⬇️

Integrative analysis of fine-scale local adaptation of winter moths to variable oak phenology For herbivorous insects whose fitness depends on tight phenological synchrony with host plants, spatial variation in plant phenology can impose strong selective pressures and promote local adaptation ...

New preprint! 🌳🐛

We combined experimental and genomic methods to study local adaptation of winter moths to variation in oak budburst timing in Wytham Woods, UK.

With @andreaestandia.bsky.social, Lea Beaupere, Ella Cole, and @sheldonbirds.bsky.social
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

I didn’t address its more cautious points (a limitation of space, for which I apologise), but my reaction was to a piece that, from my reading, doesn’t engage with the deeper ethical and methodological issues around LLMs—a view I fear many, especially senior academics, share.

Hi Terry, I read it. The enthusiasm for 'AI' feels harmful, for example, by welcoming the loss of programming roles or LLMs replacing postdoctoral labour. It was likely not your intention, but your piece implicitly espouses a view where increasing individual productivity is intrinsically good.

Reading this blog post made me sad and uneasy. We shouldn’t so uncritically celebrate tools that can accelerate the spread of poor scientific practices and distance our students from understanding. This hype will only worsen existing problems in academia: more noise, less quality, fewer secure jobs.

Out today in @plosbiology.org (1/5)

Siblings and non-parental adults provide alternative pathways to cultural inheritance in juvenile great tits 🐦🧩

Link to study:
10.0.5.91/journal.pbio...

Co-authors:
@lucymaplin.bsky.social
@galarconnieto.bsky.social

Congrats, Oleg! 🎉🎉

Global patterns of colouration complexity in the Paridae: Effects of climate and species characteristics across body regions Variation in colour complexity in the Paridae is linked to climate, climate variability and several biotic factors. The strength of the associations is patch specific. Variables related to resource c...

Happy to share our last work just published in @animalecology.bsky.social. With @claire-doutrelant.bsky.social and Peter Pearman. besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... @cnrs.fr @biology.ox.ac.uk

Thanks for a very good few years!! ☺️

Three vertical panels showing first a path blocked by bramble and bracken, then a SpongeBob time card 'five hours later'; finally, a close-up image of the destination

Oh, the joys of fieldwork this time of the year!

Courtship ritual of a buzzing spider – the male is the one with the larger pedipalps, doing the tapping

Collection of screenshots showing iterations of particle/background combinations as part of building a visualisation app.

Working on an experimental acoustic data explorer - particle & background iterations. #datavis #dataviz

A questionable take with no evidence to support it. If "by making ecological data freely available [...] we disincentivize the hard work and sacrifices required to collect it", then we need to fix incentives, not hoard data to benefit individual careers.

Calling carrion crow in an aviary

New preprint in collaboration with @babeheim.bsky.social: Vocal mimicry in corvids. We describe vocal mimicry, i.e., copying of sounds produced by another species or the environment, in 31 out of 128 corvid species (24%). (1/2)

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Sitting on the forest floor with a laptop, next to a wooden post with an acoustic recording device, surrounded by trees and undergrowth

Sunlight filtering through tall, thin trees with bright sycamire green leaves emerging on the branches

A beautiful day for fieldwork — soaking in the sounds of early spring

This cool visualisation by @nilomr.bsky.social of great tit song (or is it the clangers? - 🔊 on) reminded me of how enjoyable it was to talk at length to @sykhalid.bsky.social @timcoulson.bsky.social on @scienceofthetimes.bsky.social about our great tit song paper:
podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/n...

The demographic drivers of cultural evolution in bird song Social learning can give rise to shared behavioral patterns that persist as culture within animal communities,1,2 such as bird and whale songs and cet…

New paper on the demographic drivers of cultural evolution in Great Tit song published today - epic work led by @nilomr.bsky.social with help from @andreaestandia.bsky.social Ella Cole & Sara Keen. Why did we do this, and what did we find? 🧵 follows: 1/n
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Turns out birdsongs evolve with time and age — just like human music Birds change their tune over time depending on age, movement and memory, similar to how human dialects are shaped, researchers say following a study of great tits in the U.K.

Theory tells us that demography, i.e. pop turnover, immigration & age structure, must be important to animal culture but evidence is rare. Here this cool study on song in the famous great tits of Wytham Woods shows what is possible 🐦
www.washingtonpost.com/science/2025...

Thank you for taking the time to comment on our work!