Friederike [freddy; she/her] Hillemann
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fhillemann.bsky.social
Friederike [freddy; she/her] Hillemann
@fhillemann.bsky.social
1.7K followers 1.2K following 99 posts
. behavioural ecologist
. Foraging Ecology And Social Ties (FEASTs)
. von Humboldt postdoc fellow @ Durham
. SORTEE co-chair DEI committee
. Preprint Editor ProcB
. General Editor Hunter Gatherer Research

🌱♻️🌈🧠🌶️

✊ally to 🏳️‍⚧️ and BLM

fhillemann.github.io
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fhillemann.bsky.social
👇 interview on collaborative (research 🧪) cultures

Thanks to @humboldt-foundation.de for funding my work on cooperative subsistence across cultures, w/ @sheinalew.bsky.social, and my network at @durhamdcerc.bsky.social: @mandolinguist.bsky.social @amandinevisine.bsky.social @chimpanzeve.bsky.social
Seven people standing outside Durham University's Department of Psychology, smiling for a group photo. Lab PI Sheina is on the right in wearing a mint green jumper; I am third from the left wearing a burgundy jumper
September 15, 2025 at 3:18 PM
fhillemann.bsky.social
Happy gotcha-day to our precious princess Mellori!

11 years of unmatched chaotic energy, yet the gentlest soul when it comes to people. These days, toys are safe. Not food though, nor lip balm or chewing gum or hand cream -- will. eat. everything.

@wascherclaudia.bsky.social
chaotic family photo in a wildflower meadow — Mellori in the foreground mid-bark, showing her front teeth in a cutesy way; Siro and Claudia blurred in the background, Siro sniffing the ground and Claudia’s head cut off. beautiful but slightly unhinged. chaotic energy levelled up. 1.5-year-old Mellori with floppy ears looks straight into the camera, innocently, while surrounded by the filling of a shredded soft toy. a still-very-black Siro inspects the destruction.
July 11, 2025 at 6:38 PM
fhillemann.bsky.social
Happy birthday to our greying gent, Sir Siro!

(the shelter set this former stray's birthday to 1 July 2011, but when we adopted him in 2013, we were told he was 3–4. whatever his true age, he’s still up to mischief with partner in crime Madame Mellori)

@wascherclaudia.bsky.social
some fridge magnets including, centrally, a polaroid of two terriers in tall grass. next to it, out of focus, a photo of the same dogs from a few years ago. the black dog is a lot more grey now.
July 1, 2025 at 6:53 PM
fhillemann.bsky.social
many thanks to @paddytkaczynski.bsky.social and @cebeardsworth.bsky.social for inviting me to contribute to your Research Culture Workshop series focused on improving reproducibility, research collaboration, and data management at @ljmuofficial.bsky.social 🧪
laptop a pub: presentation with title slide "Practical Skills for Teamwork and Reproducibility - Shifting from individual workflows to effective collaboration" Slide titled Scenario 3. Text reads: “If you were leaving a project tomorrow, what do you prepare? What would you document? What would you share? What would you prioritise?” Bullet points: • A clear folder structure • Sensible file names • A README with notes on data and scripts • A hand-over status-log document • Contact information simplistic slide with shaking-hands emoji: left "collaboration", right "reproducibility" -- practices that support one often also serve the other Slide titled: Designing Projects for Teamwork How can this project be cut into pieces? And how do those pieces stay connected? Foundational Practices: Clear planning, Simple standards, Useful documentation (Modular scripts, naming conventions, README files, change logs,...)
June 30, 2025 at 4:16 PM
fhillemann.bsky.social
everyone loves the vegan raspberry croissants 🤤 they were missed when the catering changed things around yesterday, though the ve gf brownies were delicious too

also, praise for yum food each day at lunch, thank you @ehbea2025.bsky.social!
screenshot of a chat: original post: photo of a raspberry croissant and a note saying „they are back!“ reply: on my way!! [half an our later] I had two
April 17, 2025 at 12:14 PM
fhillemann.bsky.social
@ehbea.bsky.social president @rebeccasear.bsky.social invites ideas on how we (as a scientific society, but also more generally as scientists) can do individually and collectively to Stand Up For Science, and invited an inspirational group of researchers to kickstart the discussion
panel of five researchers plus and EHBEA president
April 16, 2025 at 5:17 PM
fhillemann.bsky.social
intense conferencing at #EHBEA2025: talked about "going-out" decisions, work w/ @babeheim.bsky.social @elspethready.bsky.social and stepped in presenting on food sharing networks in response to community expansion, part of the Sanguatsiniq project (github.com/sanguatsiniq/sharing_ontogenesis_public)
talk title slide: Linking weather to day-to-day food production activities: a “Going-Out Model“. Background shows two Inuit people from behind, wearing hooded parka and holding harpoons outlooking the sea while standing in a snowy landscape freddy in front of a blurred-out poster Talk take-home: Summary of findings and implications and future directions (1) Going-out behaviour shaped by season, wind, and socio-economic context (2) Unequal going-out probabilities lead to unequal access to subsistence (3) This has long-term consequences, too: skill development, cultural continuity, food sovereignty (4) This is a deliberately simple model — but it’s flexible, and I’m building on it Poster take-home: Applied implications and Theoretical significance Ensuring country food access for all community members is a key goal of current community leadership. Fortunately, our analysis indicates that young "splinter" households do not appear to be isolated from sharing networks. Community efforts to promote country food access might be more productively focused on factors other than young household age. However, we find that the observed increase in sharing may not reflect a "true increase," i.e., there has been reorganization of sharing rather than an increase in it. This would imply that there was no improvement in country food access through sharing across the two time points, which may be a point of concern. In future work we will analyze country food harvest data to assess how the availability of country food has shifted over time. Understanding the mechanisms driving change in cooperative norms is a central question in cultural evolution. Yet, there are few real-world empirical studies of longitudinal change in core adaptive cultural traits such as food sharing. Our analysis demonstrates the usefulness of the RTDICE approach, even qualitatively, to investigate change in cultural traits through ethnographic research. We find an increase in sharing in Kangiqsujuaq that is likely driven by changes in household composition. Future work will develop a more formal test of this hypothesis and investigate other possible drivers of change (e.g., household economic status). Households are often the primary unit of resource and labour pooling in human societies, and consequently are frequently taken as the unit of analysis in research. Our analysis shows that comparative analyses of cooperation networks need to account for population structure, as household composition and demography have major impacts on network structure. Focusing on individuals is not a solution, as some cultural traits are expressed through activity coordinated at the household level.
April 16, 2025 at 10:54 AM
fhillemann.bsky.social
the amazing @heidicolleran.bsky.social from @mpi-eva-leipzig.bsky.social highlighting the importance of using rich ethnographic knowledge to build better generative models of complex processes such as demographic outcomes

(Agent-Based Model work led by @verwirrt.bsky.social)
Heidi in front of a slide titled Building better causal foundations, shows a circular flowchart: Ethnography as hypotheses, not data > Causally explicit models > more informative data collection > more ethnographic fieldwork > back to Ethnography as hypotheses slide shows a flowchart of an agent-based model simulating different scenarios of fertility using first principles concluding slide titled "Cultural organisation of reproduction has been central to human evolutionary success". Huge diversity in how we do this, only beginning to understand what that means
April 16, 2025 at 8:59 AM
fhillemann.bsky.social
I believe both the video and the interactive page linked in the original post are meant to show average counts relative to 2024, but the figures don’t seem to match up
composite image of 10 screenshots from the video summarising the garden watch results: photos of the ten most reported species and how much more or less they were reported in 2025 compared to 2024 screenshot of the RSPB website showing the Big Garden Birdwatch results. it's an interactive page, allowing to filter for year and region (UK-wide, or only England, Scotland, Wales, N.Ireland). Results for 2025 show that the top ten species didn't actually move much or at all from the previous year
April 11, 2025 at 10:05 AM
fhillemann.bsky.social
FYI, the numbers in the video don’t match those reported on your website, probably a bug in the data feed?

@rspb.bsky.social @rspbengland.bsky.social
@rspbscotland.bsky.social
screenshot of the RSPB website showing the Big Garden Birdwatch results. it's an interactive page, allowing to filter for year and region (UK-wide, or only England, Scotland, Wales, N.Ireland). Results for 2025 show that the top ten species didn't actually move much or at all from the previous year
April 11, 2025 at 8:57 AM
fhillemann.bsky.social
update: they've now settled into a cluster. it's been absolutely fascinating to watch this past hour!
April 10, 2025 at 4:04 PM
fhillemann.bsky.social
what's happening at the back of our East-England garden right now 👀

looks like mason bees to me which are a solitary bee species but it's thousands of them, the whole garden is buzzing! -- mass emergence? drone congregation?
video 2/2

🧪 @beeresearchpapers.bsky.social @theapiarist.org @bbka.org.uk
April 10, 2025 at 3:01 PM
fhillemann.bsky.social
what's happening at the back of our East-England garden right now 👀

looks like mason bees to me which are a solitary bee species but it's thousands of them, the whole garden is buzzing! -- mass emergence? drone congregation?

video 1/2
April 10, 2025 at 3:01 PM
fhillemann.bsky.social
love bookshop but a signed copy and photo with the amazing author at the release tour? unbeatable! thank you @dfdubz.bsky.social for a fantastic night and all you do through @theguiltyfeminist.bsky.social, including writing this book!
Six Conversations We're Scared to Have available at @bookshop.org
Claudia next to Deborah Frances-White, author of "Six Conversations We're Scared to Have", holding up her newly released book blurry selfie while the theatre is filling up for the book release event. stage set up with two chairs: for the author of the book and for the host of the evening. screen shows a photo of the author, Deborah Frances-White, and the title of the show "The Road to Gilead". context from the event's page: Rapid changes in the US have us on the road to Gilead (the dystopian future Margaret Atwood laid out in her novel turned TV show The Handmaid's Tale). That road is headed through Europe & the UK and we must decide what practical and strategic steps we might take to fight it. Why have divisive conversations become so flammable? Is there any value in cancelling historical figures? How has the so-called 'transgender debate' become so toxic and what can we do to genuinely help? Why are the most progressive people calling for censorship in comedy? Is cancel culture real and, if so, can shaming and shunning really work? How do we achieve progress in today's, y'know, screaming hellscape? We are understandably scared to have some of these conversations. But Deborah Frances-White is even more scared of not having them. Having grown up in a cult, she knows the value of freedom of speech, critical thinking and the ability to disagree while really fighting for change. In her new book, she encourages us to ask difficult questions, really listen and know when to negotiate and when to resist. Most importantly, she explores how to change minds, including our own. And she argues that we don't need to agree on everything in order to find a way out and a way forward on some of the biggest issues in today's world. Are you ready to talk?
April 10, 2025 at 12:32 PM
fhillemann.bsky.social
[at]womensartbluesky.bsky.social cleared their blog of TERF dog whistles (see rationalwiki.org/wiki/TERF_glossary) but still no distancing from TERFs or clarification of trans-inclusivity - 🚩🚩🚩

better alternatives exist:
@womensart1.bsky.social and @womensart2.bsky.social

bsky.app/profile/wome...
screenshot of a post on another social media platform, dated 30 Sep 2020. The post reads "My tweet about womensart being a TERF account is still making the rounds. If there's still any doubt in your mind after their repeated refusal to feature trans women, this is from their about page. Please stop promoting this trans-exclusive project, friends." and it shows a screenshot of the website womensartblog.wordpress.com: "specific exploration of the artwork of women has enabled insights into areas including capitalism, migration, class, globalization, ethnicity, disability and so on, from an unusual, uniquely female perspective. In doing so this has exposed a subtext of experiential and biological connections between women, as issues relating to girlhood, motherhood, abortion, body image, pregnancy, infertility, social role, violence against women and so on, are highlighted as common historic and global themes in their work." screenshot of a bluesky post by @womensart2.bsky.social, date: Nov 17 2024. It clarifies confusion about the various accounts with similar names. Along with a photo of the account with the handle "womensartbluesky", it says "This is the TERF account. Their original username was womensartl and this page was created as a parody, now both @womensart1.bsky.social and @womensart2.bsky.social are run at least in part by trans women."
April 5, 2025 at 8:49 AM
fhillemann.bsky.social
had such a great visit to @mpi-eva-leipzig.bsky.social last week, co-working and catching up with friends, and celebrating Dr @pablovarase.bsky.social
Pablo in front of his PhD defence title slide: VARIABILITY, RESOURCE DYNAMICS, AND THE HUMAN LIFE CYCLE, by Pablo J. Varas Enríquez a tiny polaroid photo of myself holding a glass of bubbly and my friend Elena selfie in front of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig screenshot of a WhatsApp conversation. my message includes a photo taken inside the airport gate waiting area, showing a Ryanair plane through the window and a seating area with a sign that reads ‘Berlin Pub’, my text reads ‘don’t mind if I do.’, the reply says, ‘be rude not to.
March 27, 2025 at 4:52 PM
fhillemann.bsky.social
writing is hard. science is a collaborative effort. writing as big team? not straightforward either

some excellent tips for common challenges when leading a many-author non-empirical paper: osf.io/preprints/os...

..and for co-authoring one: osf.io/preprints/os...

🧪 @tweissgerber.bsky.social
Abstract Many-author non-empirical papers include recommendations or consensus statements, catalogs of ideas, roadmaps for future research, calls to action, or "how to" articles. These papers have great potential to change the conversation or address unmet needs within research communities. Large, diverse authorship teams can create valuable resources that no individual co-author could create independently. Achieving these goals, however, requires a very different approach than researchers typically use to prepare papers with fewer authors. A small team of lead writers typically leads the content generation and writing processes. Many co-authors collaborate to create content and provide feedback throughout the writing process. Lead writers face many challenges, including defining the content and structure of the paper, coordinating complex logistics, preparing themselves and co-authors for a unique writing experience, and managing high-volume feedback. Here, we outline ten simple rules for leading a many-author non-empirical paper. These rules guide readers through the content generation and writing processes and highlight practical solutions to common challenges. While these rules were developed by preparing non-empirical papers with at least 30 authors, some rules may apply to research papers, or non-empirical papers with fewer authors. Lead writers can also use our companion paper, which shares ten simple rules for being a co-author on a many-author non-empirical paper, to prepare co-authors for an efficient and effective collaborative process.
March 13, 2025 at 12:38 PM
fhillemann.bsky.social
#InternationalWomensDay
card saying „Join me in celebrating the accomplishments of feminist fights for gender equality and human rights!“ showing outline of four people holding up signs, photos of actual protest signs. one sign says „if your feminism doesn’t include trans people it’s trash“, another one says „if you trust me with a choice how can you trust me with a child“, another one says „equal rights for others doesn’t mean less rights for you. it’s not a pie“, the fourth sign says „science not silence“
March 8, 2025 at 11:12 PM
fhillemann.bsky.social
Corvids cache food—surprisingly much in equatorial zones! breeding system, trophic niche, and habitat breadth not found to affect whether a species is a specialist or generalist cacher

specialist caching (seasonal, seeds/nuts for long-term retrieval) likely ancestral state

#BehCog behav eco evo 🧪
corvid phylogenetic tree, i.e. graphical representation of the evolutionary relationships among species, showing the outcome of ancestral state analysis, with probability of classification as generalist cacher, specialist cacher, or non cacher shown as pie charts. Specialist caching was estimated to be the ancestral state of caching in corvids with a scaled likelihood of 69%, compared to generalist caching (31%) and non-caching (0%)
February 26, 2025 at 9:24 AM
fhillemann.bsky.social
enttäuscht über problematisch oberflächliche Betrachtung und Verbreitung von Wahlkreiskarten die Stereotype über Ostdeutschland verstärken, mit paternalistisch Ton.

ich empfehle
DVPW: Die Macht der blauen Karten, 08/24: shorturl.at/DmSbZ
dpd: Populismus – in Ost und West, 09/21
shorturl.at/3YHms
Europawahl 2024: Verbleibende AfD-Präferenzen nach Einbezug demografischer und ökonomischer Merkmale "Abbildung 2 stellt die Verteilung der Residuen der OLS-Regression dar. Sie kann als jener Teil der regionalen AfD-Präferenz interpretiert werden, der nicht durch die verwendeten demografischen und ökonomischen Merkmale erklärt wird und daher möglicherweise als kulturelle Prägung einer Region betrachtet werden kann. In der Karte fällt auf, dass die Ost-West-Unterschiede zwar weiterhin bestehen, jedoch deutlich schwächer ausgeprägt sind." Quelle: Bunte Karte, bunte Wahlen? AfD-Präferenzen jenseits von Ost und West. Von Alexander Kopka, Petrik Runst. 2024. Wirtschaftsdienst. Heft 9, S. 614–617 Europawahl 2024: Verbleibende AfD-Präferenzen nach Einbezug demografischer und ökonomischer Merkmale "Abbildung 2 stellt die Verteilung der Residuen der OLS-Regression dar. Sie kann als jener Teil der regionalen AfD-Präferenz interpretiert werden, der nicht durch die verwendeten demografischen und ökonomischen Merkmale erklärt wird und daher möglicherweise als kulturelle Prägung einer Region betrachtet werden kann. In der Karte fällt auf, dass die Ost-West-Unterschiede zwar weiterhin bestehen, jedoch deutlich schwächer ausgeprägt sind." Quelle: Bunte Karte, bunte Wahlen? AfD-Präferenzen jenseits von Ost und West. Von Alexander Kopka, Petrik Runst. 2024. Wirtschaftsdienst. Heft 9, S. 614–617 Bundestagswahl 2017: Effekte auf den AfD Stimmenanteil in West-und Ostdeutschland. Quelle bpb Deutsche Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung. Abbildung zeigt dass die Faktoren Arbeitslosigkeit in 1998, Arbeitslosigkeit in 2017, reguläre Beschäftigung in 2017, und Einkommenssteuer 2017 in beiden Landesteilen in die gleiche Richtung wirkten bei der Bundestagswahl 2017, wenn auch der Effekt auf den AfD-Stimmenanteil zT nicht statistisch signifikant ist Screenshot eines Blog Beitrags auf storymaps.arcgis.com. Zu sehen sind zwei Karten der USA, links eine klassische Wahlkreiskarte in der jeder Wahlkreis in der Farbe der jeweils stärksten Partei eingefärbt ist, rechts eine Karte in der die Wahlkreise auch in der jeweils stärksten Partei eingefärbt sind, aber Wahlkreise sind als Kreise dargestellt die nach Größe skaliert sind, also Anzahl der Wählenden/Stimmen. Darunter der Titel des Artikels: Land Doesn't Vote...People do. Unsere Methoden der Wahlkartografie sind fehlerhaft. Wahlkarten sind oft irreführend, indem sie die Fläche eines Gebiets mit der Anzahl der Stimmen verwechseln.
February 24, 2025 at 9:32 AM
fhillemann.bsky.social
P.S. Anyone got a “cross-eyed blue bird on its back” icon!?
jk, I’ll remove the link from my website now; that profile has been inactive for a while now
(not deleting that profile because I want to protect my handle)

🧪scifeed
screenshot of my twitter/x profile with a post from October 2023, pinned to the top of my feed. post says „Science Twitter's past, Mastodon, charm didn't last. Now, on Bluesky, I'm cast. (Haiku AI-assisted by ChatGPT)“ and links to my BlueSky profile
February 21, 2025 at 4:33 PM
fhillemann.bsky.social
old BlueSky icon was a blue-gradient square, rounded corners—easily hacked. now I use the butterfly svg path from their web source code—shoutout to open-source licenses!

@support.bsky.team, can I provide the svg to academicons github.com/jpswalsh/academicons? pretty sure it'll be popular

🧪 scifeed
screenshot of my website in inspection mode. left pane shows the website’s header/contact section with social media link icons, the BlueSky butterfly icon is highlighted. right pane is the website source code with the svg path for the BlueSky butterfly icon
February 21, 2025 at 4:25 PM
fhillemann.bsky.social
Thanks both! read Barnes’ comment before—it captures the sentiment (screenshot) and maybe I misremembered the quote and reworded it in my head? plausible!

@jorgeapenas.bsky.social not sure where you got that quote from, but it’s not in Barnes' piece -- @sobchuk.bsky.social ChatGPT phantom quote?! 😅
screenshot from "Publish your computer code: it is good enough" by Nick Barnes. highlighted section reads: That the code is a little raw is one of the main reasons scientists give for not sharing it with others. Yet, software in all trades is written to be good enough for the job intended. So if your code is good enough to do the job, then it is good enough to release — and releasing it will help your research and your field.
February 20, 2025 at 3:57 PM
fhillemann.bsky.social
interested in vocal communication in corvids?
don’t miss this work led by @wascherclaudia.bsky.social:

• a new review of 130 studies doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2024.123073

• an invitation to submit your research to a Special Issue. more details here: link.springer.com/collections/icghgfcfcd
silhouette of a Carrion crow with plastic colour ring on a fence pole, cawing in golden hour light, fields and mountains in the distance screenshot of the Animal Cognition special issue announcement; reads: Vocal communication in corvids In the field of vocal communication, research has mostly focussed on birds because of their vocal learning capacity and non-human primates due to their phylogenetic proximity with humans. Both models are key to understand the driving factors in the evolution of communicative systems. Among birds, corvids occupy a large diversity of environments, and their social systems can vary, for example in the number of social bonds individuals maintain, which, according to the socio-complexity hypothesis, could influence characteristics of vocal communication. Despite more than 40 years of research on the behaviour and cognition of corvids, their potential value as an alternative model to primates in understanding the evolution of vocal communication has only emerged recently. Understanding and measuring various characteristics of vocal production and perception of signals could be key to further understand the evolution of sociality as well as cognition in different taxa. Further, understanding of vocal communication can also aid conservation efforts for species of conservation concern. In the proposed Special Collection, we aim to synthesize current knowledge and develop a joint vision for the future direction of research on evolutionary drivers of vocal complexity and cognitive underpinnings of vocal communication. Note: Open for submissions, Submission deadline 31 March 2025
January 23, 2025 at 12:18 PM
fhillemann.bsky.social
very proud to be involved in this project, expertly led by Rowan

Bird ringing offers valuable ecology skills but concerns about accessibility arise from hierarchical training structures and insufficient safeguarding against misconduct, disproportionately affecting marginalised groups.
screenshot from the conference abstract booklet, summarising Rowan's presentation: In the UK over 2,600 volunteers participate in bird ringing, which allows nature enthusiasts of various backgrounds to gain field-based skills that can benefit their professional aspirations. Anyone can participate, but trainees are supervised by licensed trainers, and obtaining a permit requires years of working closely with a trainer to learn proper handling and identification techniques; the trainer is also responsible for deeming trainees fit to obtain a permit. This hierarchy requires trainees to work in small groups with their trainers, often in remote locations, and in some areas there is only one trainer available. As a result, trainees who have negative experiences with their trainer or group may not have feasible alternatives to remain involved in ringing, and there is no clear process to report misconduct. We focus on LGBTQIA+ ringers to identify barriers and develop recommendations for a safer and more inclusive ringing environment, by developing and distributing a survey about LGBTQIA+ ringers’ experiences. Understanding barriers experienced by LGBTQIA+ ringers is imperative to addressing these issues and improving the accessibility of ringing and similar activities.
December 14, 2024 at 1:42 PM