It was a real pleasure to have accidently been involved in Joe Wilde's (not here) paper published last week: doi.org/10.1098/rspb...

It has terrifying Bayesian Hidden Markov Models, important insights about dynamic sexual signalling, and a robot crab called "Wavey Dave"- what's not to love?

Using this method we were able to estimate the lifespans of 32 Female and 33 Male species of toothed whale. Data and methods in these R packages:

github.com/samellisq/ma...
github.com/samellisq/ma...

In the paper we develop Bayesian methods to infer the underlying mortality function of toothed whales from age-structured data, while carrying through potential sources of error into the final estimates.

Very excited to see our paper using historical data to infer toothed whale lifespans published this week in the Biological Journal of the Linnaean Society (@biojlinnsoc.bsky.social)

doi.org/10.1093/biol...

w. @darrencroft.bsky.social @drwhale.bsky.social @mialybkaer.bsky.social, Dan Franks

Project supervised by me with Andy Young and Lauren Brent based at the Centre for Research in Animal Behaviour in Exeter.

Get in touch if you have any questions
The project is funded by
@SWBio_DTP
. More details here: swbio.ac.uk/animal-behav...

Funded PhD Available at the University of Exeter.

Loneliness is a global epidemic. We want to use field experiments in wild rabbits to understand why our social connections change with age.

Deadline: 11th Dec

More info & how to apply here: bpb-eu-w2.wpmucdn.com/blogs.bristo...

Excellent cetaceans of the Azores in the Guardian today.

But I do feel the need to point out that this male is not "escorting" the group from "300m behind". Females lead the group. And males are reliant on their female group mates to survive. The escorting is the other way round

Come and join our vibrant research community
in the Centre for Research in animal Behaviour at Exeter
.
Get in touch s.ellis@exeter.ac.uk if you have any questions, queries or inquiries.

Application deadline 29th October to start in ~Jan 2025