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Blair Costelloe

@blaircostelloe.bsky.social
3.7K followers 725 following 1.3K posts

Director of Research & Conservation at the Mara Elephant Project. Behavioral ecologist using drones for wildlife research & conservation. Co-PI of WildDrone and WildBotics.

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Reposted by Blair Costelloe
Will Oestreich @will-oestreich.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
I am recruiting a PhD student to work with our group at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior! Learn more & apply here: tinyurl.com/kd4xx4ku Deadline: 15 Nov 2026 Start date: Flexible (summer-fall 2027) @mpi-animalbehav.bsky.social @livingingroups.bsky.social @carlzeissstiftung.bsky.social
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Blair Costelloe @blaircostelloe.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
I am thrilled to announce that I have a new position as the Director of Research and Conservation at the Mara Elephant Project! @maraelephant.bsky.social 🐘 I am excited to apply my expertise in wildlife ecology & conservation tech to support the conservation of elephants in the Maasai Mara. (1/3)
An African elephant standing in green savanna grass with bushes and rain clouds in the background.
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Mara Elephant Project @maraelephant.bsky.social · 11/08/2026
For #WorldElephantDay, your gift goes twice as far. Through August 12, donations are doubled up to $25,000 to support solutions that help farming communities and elephants thrive together. Help us reach $50,000: bit.ly/world-elepha... @worldelephantday.bsky.social
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Mara Elephant Project @maraelephant.bsky.social · 04/08/2026
For #WorldElephantDay, your gift goes twice as far. Through August 12, donations are doubled up to $25,000 to help train drone pilots and expand the technology protecting people and elephants. Help us reach $50,000: bit.ly/world-elepha... @worldelephantday.bsky.social
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Jacopo Razzauti @jacoporazzauti.bsky.social · 16/07/2026
Since we launched FERAL last November, it has been used by more than 120+ users on more than 200 datasets for a total of 1500+ runs. In this new version, we included the things people asked for: - there are now three training configs: lite, default, max - mode lite runs on just 8gB vRAM GPUs
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Jacopo Razzauti @jacoporazzauti.bsky.social · 16/07/2026
FERAL 1.0 is out! Just to remind you: FERAL is an open-source toolkit for supervised animal behaviour segmentation directly from videos with no pose estimation needed. We made it much easier to install and run FERAL First, to install FERAL: pip install feral www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 🧵
biorxiv.org
FERAL: A Supervised Video-Understanding System for Direct Video-to-Behavior Mapping
Quantifying animal behavior often requires segmenting continuous actions into discrete, interpretable states, yet most automated pipelines infer actions from keypoint dynamics and are limited by keypo...
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Dom Cram @domcram.bsky.social · 09/06/2026
⚠️ Students looking for experience, opportunities, Masters, PhDs etc in Animal Behaviour: the @asab.org mailing list is an invaluable source with exciting posts every few days. Sign up here: www.asab.org/mailing-list 📩
asab.org
Mailing list — ASAB
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Blair Costelloe @blaircostelloe.bsky.social · 12/06/2026
Just over a week left to apply! 🧪 I am happy to answer any questions!
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Rupert Seidl @rupertseidl.bsky.social · 11/06/2026
Come work with us and do research in Germany’s only national park in the Alps, iconic Berchtesgaden Nationalpark! We are looking to fill a PostDoc position in vegetation ecology (tinyurl.com/PostDocBerch...) and a PhD position in mountain forest dynamics (tinyurl.com/PhDBerchtesg...).
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Bethany Brookshire @beebrookshire.bsky.social · 04/06/2026
This thread. This thread explains why when I saw this headline yesterday my stomach dropped all the way to my toes. www.reuters.com/business/hea...
reuters.com
Flesh-eating screwworm confirmed in Texas calf as parasite crosses border from Mexico
New World screwworm, a parasitic fly that eats warm-blooded animals alive, has been found in a calf in Texas, exposing the nation's cattle herd ​to a serious new threat.
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Blair Costelloe @blaircostelloe.bsky.social · 29/05/2026
If you'd like to get an idea of what a PhD with the WildBotics project will be like, check out our sister project WildDrone www.wilddrone.eu I'm happy to answer questions from any potentially interested applicants!
wilddrone.eu
WildDrone – Drones for Wildlife Conservation
An international training network funded by the EU’s Marie Skłodowska Curie Actions to research and develop the use of drones for wildlife conservation.
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Blair Costelloe @blaircostelloe.bsky.social · 27/05/2026
We are offering a PhD position with the WildBotics project @uni-konstanz.de! Want to join an interdisciplinary research network and use drones and computer vision to study animal behavior, ecology and conservation in Kenya? 🇰🇪🐘 Please apply! Deadline June 21 🧪🌍🌿 Full details: tinyurl.com/yn8jkzcf
tinyurl.com
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Blair Costelloe @blaircostelloe.bsky.social · 27/05/2026
We are offering a PhD position with the WildBotics project @uni-konstanz.de! Want to join an interdisciplinary research network and use drones and computer vision to study animal behavior, ecology and conservation in Kenya? 🇰🇪🐘 Please apply! Deadline June 21 🧪🌍🌿 Full details: tinyurl.com/yn8jkzcf
tinyurl.com
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Mara Elephant Project @maraelephant.bsky.social · 21/03/2026
Win a 7-night Kenyan safari with Governors’ Camp Collection—while helping protect elephants. Once you arrive in Kenya, everything is taken care of. Plus, you can schedule your trip anytime in the next two years. Entries support protecting the Loita Forest. Enter by March 31: buff.ly/vsIKdLV
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Emily Hague 🐳 @emily-hague.bsky.social · 11/03/2026
📢 SURVEY: Do you use - or have you ever used - drones in marine mammal research? 🐳🐋If so, please complete our short survey and help us map the growing range of ways UAVs are being used around the world for marine mammal monitoring and research: app.onlinesurveys.jisc.ac.uk/s/uhi/drones...
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Ainsley S @americanbeetles.bsky.social · 01/03/2026
the humiliation of going on a hot date then finding out she wasn't even in the same PHYLUM (then someone writes a whole paper about it, with photos of your wiener)
photos from an excellent study by Cohen et al (2021) of a cerambycid beetle just straight up doing it with the flower of Disa forficaria, in a classic example of a ~sexual mimicry pollination system~
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Mongabay @mongabay.com · 19/02/2026
Scientists in Indonesia have drone-tagged a pygmy blue whale for the first time, revealing a previously unknown migration route to western Australia. Researchers warn ship strikes, noise and climate change remain key threats. Timor-Leste teams plan to replicate the method.
news.mongabay.com
Scientists discover a new whale highway after tagging a pygmy blue whale by drone
Indonesian scientists have attached a satellite tag onto an endangered pygmy blue whales for the first time by drone. The tag’s data not only revealed a new feeding site for the species (Balaenoptera…
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Jonathan C Slaght @jonathanslaght.com · 20/02/2026
Post Doc Alert: "large mammal monitoring in northwest Montana...part of a collaborative project between the University of Montana and Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Parks." More: www.schooljobs.com/careers/ummi... 🧪
schooljobs.com
Job Opportunities | University of Montana, Helena College & UM Western
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Stephanie L King @stephanielking.bsky.social · 15/02/2026
Fantastic opportunity to work with us at Shark Bay Dolphin Research 👇🏻
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Bec Jones @jbfarthing.bsky.social · 25/11/2025
Yes please
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Methods in Ecology and Evolution @methodsinecoevol.bsky.social · 29/01/2026
New blog post!!🚨 Michael Chimento gives an overview of the new R package STbayes, designed for creating, fitting and understanding Bayesian models of social transmission 🌍 🧪 Read the blog here 👇
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Studying social transmission using STbayes
Post provided by Michael Chimento. When studying animal culture, it’s important to establish whether novel behaviours or information have spread through social contact, or are rather innovated or p…
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AniMove @animove-course.bsky.social · 27/01/2026
Excited to announce our courses for #MovementEcology.🤗 This year we will be in #Africa @mpalarc.bsky.social at Mpala Research Centre. Starting with a basic R course designed for #AfricanResearchers, followed by a two-week international Animove workshop. animove.org/basic-r-cour... Please share 👍
animove.org
Basic R Course 2026 / Kenya | AniMove
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Rav BOO!dram 🎃👻 @rvbdrm.com · 09/01/2026
BIG FIGHT AT POLAND’S WROCLAW ZOO!!!
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Jacquelyn Gill @jacquelyngill.bsky.social · 17/12/2025
They’re stealing from us. They are stealing from us and we have to put a stop to this. This cannot stand.
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Richard McElreath 🐈‍⬛ @rmcelreath.bsky.social · 17/12/2025
The Max Planck Society has begun an exploratory round table for open science. We are drafting some recommendations to leadership. Still a long way to go! But here are my notes on the most recent draft, just so you all know how I am trying to steer things.
Richard McElreath: It must not be overlooked that junior researchers DO NOT TRUST US. We, the directors, are a big part of the problem. We made this system, we remake it every year, and we benefit from it. What can we do to credibly signal our commitment to reform a corrupt research culture? My conversations with junior scientists in the society has taught me that directors are too often either indifferent or hostile to science reform. We cannot hope to convince our prize winning colleagues. Their egos are immune. But we can replace retirements with researchers who care more about integrity than their own prestige. This is important both for earning the trust of the junior researchers who really do the research in the MPG and for attracting excellent future directors and starting to earn the trust of the public. So I suggest two strong signals to our junior researchers (and the public): (1) we will reform recruitment and promotion at all levels to eliminate proxies like citation counts and journal brands in favor of reliability and sustainability; (2) we will make open science skills a core part of scientific training, through the graduate schools at a minimum, as conditions for the central funding. The most ambitious thing we could do, as hinted at in item 5 above, is to meaningfully invest in metascientific research. As the largest basic research organization in the world, the MPG is uniquely suited to studying research and its products from a broad perspective that includes the humanities, the sciences, and policy. Governments are already involved in science reform. Someone should study it in an organized and sustained way.
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Peter Brannen @peterbrannen.bsky.social · 17/12/2025
An absolute bedrock institution for understanding how the planet works, just civilization-scaled vandalism by the most incurious morons on Earth
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Andrew Straw @andrewstraw.bsky.social · 06/12/2025
Have you ever wondered what you would find if you could keep your eyes on a bee for more than a few meters? Us, too! preprint (with videos!) + thread 🧵 Precise, individualized foraging flights in honey #bees 🐝 revealed by multicopter drone-based tracking www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 1/9
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Blair Costelloe @blaircostelloe.bsky.social · 03/12/2025
Interested in a multidisciplinary PhD that integrates robotics, computer vision, ecology and conservation? We are looking for 12 Doctoral Candidates to join the WildBotics MSCA Doctoral Network! Positions are fully funded for 36 months! More info & apply @ www.wildbotics.eu/recruitment 🧪👩‍🔬🌍
wildbotics.eu
WildBotics - Recruitment
We are looking for you!
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Alan McElligott @amcell.bsky.social · 02/12/2025
New from us. 2025. Adaptive behavioural strategies to seasonal challenges by a semiurban feral ungulate. (Water buffalo) Led by @debottam1991.bsky.social www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
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Debottam Bhattacharjee @debottam1991.bsky.social · 04/12/2025
🚨 New Publication on Feral Water Buffalo 🐃 🐃 in Animal Behaviour [Also my 1st publication in AB 😊] @asab.org @asabeducation.bsky.social Adaptive behavioural strategies to seasonal challenges by a semiurban feral ungulate W/ @amcell.bsky.social Kate Flay & Hannah Mumby doi.org/10.1016/j.an...
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Blair Costelloe @blaircostelloe.bsky.social · 03/12/2025
Interested in a multidisciplinary PhD that integrates robotics, computer vision, ecology and conservation? We are looking for 12 Doctoral Candidates to join the WildBotics MSCA Doctoral Network! Positions are fully funded for 36 months! More info & apply @ www.wildbotics.eu/recruitment 🧪👩‍🔬🌍
wildbotics.eu
WildBotics - Recruitment
We are looking for you!
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Christos C. Ioannou @ccioannou.bsky.social · 24/11/2025
@asab.org Spring, aimed at ECRs, is coming to Bristol! Conference grant DEADLINE for Developing Country Applicants (<£2500) or anyone needing an early decision for visas (<£750) is in ONE WEEK, 1st December. www.asab.org/conference-g... Referee statement also needed by then! 🐝🐜🦟🦂🐠🐟🐬🦎🐸🦆🐿️🦓
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Jacopo Razzauti @jacoporazzauti.bsky.social · 19/11/2025
FERAL goes wild: 🦓 Drone footage of Grevy’s zebras (with @blaircostelloe.bsky.social, Ben Koger and @icouzin.bsky.social) Pose-estimation pipelines struggled to detect vigilance behavior from overhead drone videos. FERAL identifies vigilance bouts directly from video.
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Blair Costelloe @blaircostelloe.bsky.social · 19/11/2025
So impressed with this software! Check it out!
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Jacopo Razzauti @jacoporazzauti.bsky.social · 19/11/2025
Give FERAL: 1. videos 2. behavioral annotations FERAL fine-tunes a video foundation model on your data. FERAL outputs: - segmented ethograms - model weights you can reuse All in few lines of code (no ML or coding expertise needed). It runs easily on Google Colab. Try it yourself: www.getferal.ai
getferal.ai
FERAL Documentation
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Jacopo Razzauti @jacoporazzauti.bsky.social · 19/11/2025
Our preprint is out! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Peter Skovorodnikov and I are excited to present FERAL: a new video-understanding toolkit that maps raw video directly to behavior, no pose estimation required. It works across species, from lab to field, and even in collective systems. (🧵1/n)
biorxiv.org
FERAL: A Video-Understanding System for Direct Video-to-Behavior Mapping
Animal behavior unfolds continuously in time, yet quantitative analyses often require segmenting it into discrete, interpretable states. Although manual annotation can achieve this, it remains slow, s...
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Sarah McAnulty, Ph.D. @sarahmackattack.bsky.social · 31/10/2025
The amount of AI generated art in slides at this conference, primarily used by older scientists, is killing me. Scientists please. Don’t use these ai platforms to make your figures or slides. They look bad and I have yet to see them meaningfully improve the message of talks.
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Andrea Fuller @andreafuller.bsky.social · 14/10/2025
Opportunity to join our team. Open to African students at Masters or PhD level.
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Sarah McAnulty, Ph.D. @sarahmackattack.bsky.social · 19/09/2025
I wanted to get a video of this ghost crab but every time I got close to their hole they scuttled back in, so I tried getting clever with it. I made a little sandcastle and shoved my phone into it, hit record, and walked away. Crab was VERY suspicious of this addition to their environment.
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Daniel Carlson @danielwcarlson.bsky.social · 29/08/2025
We built a calculator that doesn't work, but don't worry, it's also a plagiarism machine that will tell you to kill yourself. It runs on the world's oceans and costs 10 trillion dollars.
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Sarah, manic pixie dream MILF @goatsarah.org · 29/08/2025
I want to explain a few things and then it might be clearer why UK trans people are upset. In 2001 I married my wife, Sylvia. In 2005 I started medical transition. (1/13)
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Ann Kennedy @antihebbiann.bsky.social · 18/08/2025
🍂 Applications are now open for our ML-for-Behavior 5-day course at Jackson Labs in Bar Harbor, ME. Talks and hands-on workshops cover pose estimation, supervised/unsupervised behavior quantification, and downstream behavior analyses. Financial aid is available! www.jax.org/education-an...
students in last year's advanced bootcamp on software development and version controlview of the Highseas Conference Center where the course is held
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Arko Lucieer @arkolucieer.bsky.social · 29/07/2025
I am currently advertising a new 3-year research position in my TerraLuma team: Research Associate in Drone Field Operations (Academic Level A) The position will support the Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network’s (@TERN_Aus) Dronescape project. careers.utas.edu.au/cw/en/job/50...
careers.utas.edu.au
Current Vacancies
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Blair Costelloe @blaircostelloe.bsky.social · 16/06/2025
Announcing the WildDrone Summer School Sept 22-26. Registration open at wilddrone.eu/summer-school/ Join us in Konstanz for a week of drones, computer vision and conservation ecology! 🧪🌍
wilddrone.eu
Summer School – WildDrone
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Blair Costelloe @blaircostelloe.bsky.social · 16/06/2025
Announcing the WildDrone Summer School Sept 22-26. Registration open at wilddrone.eu/summer-school/ Join us in Konstanz for a week of drones, computer vision and conservation ecology! 🧪🌍
wilddrone.eu
Summer School – WildDrone
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Zoë Goldsborough @zoegoldsborough.bsky.social · 19/05/2025
Hot off the press 📣: one of the most surprising and unsettling findings of my PhD. A novel social tradition emerged in the tool-using white-faced capuchins of Jicarón island… abducting and carrying the infants of another species. Thread with gifs, videos, and all the bizarre details 👇
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Ecology of Animal Societies @livingingroups.bsky.social · 19/05/2025
Humans have many unusual traditions. But did you know animals’ strange behaviors can become culture too? Out now in Current Biology (doi.org/10.1016/j.cu...) we show the rise and spread of a surprising tradition: interspecies infant abduction. Interactive timeline (www.ab.mpg.de/671374) 🧵 (1/12)
An illustration of a white-faced capuchin monkey carrying a howler infant on their back while cracking nuts with a stone
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Jacquelyn Gill @jacquelyngill.bsky.social · 09/05/2025
This is an absolute disaster. If we don't stop this, they will turn NSF into a pawn of the Trump administration. There will be no research on climate, biodiversity, or anything that isn't eugenics or AI or how to more efficiently destroy the planet for profit. This cannot be allowed to happen.
science.org
Exclusive: NSF faces radical shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions
Changes seen as a response to presidential directives on what research to fund
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European Commission @ec.europa.eu · 08/05/2025
Choose Science. Choose Europe. A new Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Postdoctoral Fellowships 2025 call is now open. With a budget of €404.3 million, it will support around 1,650 researchers from Europe and beyond. Apply by 10 September → europa.eu/!fBTMgF
A graphic for the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA), showing a historical portrait of Marie Skłodowska-Curie overlaid with an image of four young researchers walking down a hallway. The European Commission logo is in the top left. Text reads: "Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions – €404.3 million to support postdoctoral researchers”
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