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Tomas Kay

@tomaskay.bsky.social
174 followers 187 following 28 posts

Social evolution, natural history. Simons Junior Fellow & postdoc in Kronauer lab, Rockefeller University | PhD: Keller lab, University of Lausanne

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Reposted by Tomas Kay
Leah Houri-Zeevi @leahhouri.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
🩸🩸🩸TODAY WE SHARE TWO MAJOR DISCOVERIES🩸🩸🩸 1. We peered into genomes and brains of the rare mosquitoes that QUIT feeding on blood and found what biting is built from 2. Humans got rid of isoleucine in their blood, malaria suffers from it, and mosquito proteomes budget for it THREADS>
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Vikram Chandra @vchandra.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
I am excited to announce that I will start the Brain Origins Lab at the Crick in March 2027! Using acoels as a model system, the lab will study how animal brains evolve, and how innovations in brain organisation enable new computational abilities and the evolution of complex behaviour.
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Jacopo Razzauti @jacoporazzauti.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
FERAL is now agent-friendly! You can train and validate your model and analyze your animal behavior videos through your agent! Together with the introduction of FERAL lite in the previous release, we think this will make FERAL much easier to use! www.getferal.ai www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
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Germain Montazeaud @germtz.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
Very happy to share that the @erc.europa.eu has selected PHYTOPOGON for funding! 😁🌱 In this project, we will test whether plants have greenbeard genes — an evolutionary mechanism that could allow them to recognize the genetic identity of their neighbours.
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Philipp Brand @pbrand.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
We're about to start an exciting new project with generous support from the @erc.europa.eu In SIMBIO, we want to know how bacterial endosymbionts modify neurons on the genetic and functional level and how this shapes the evolution of their host's mating behavior.
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Philipp Brand @pbrand.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
We are looking for a research assistant to join our team. brain.mpg.de/brand Apply using the link below if you are interested in doing research on the neural and genetic underpinnings of behavioral evolution. jobs.brain.mpg.de/jobposting/6...
Description of job ad for Research Assistant in the lab of Evolutionary Neuroscience and Behavior Lab at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research.Description of job ad for Research Assistant in the lab of Evolutionary Neuroscience and Behavior Lab at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research.
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Hugo Darras @hugodarras.bsky.social · 04/07/2026
Our lab is recruiting 🐜🧬 : - PhD student, functional genomics, Chinese nationals only - Postdocs, population genomics, open internationally Lab info and contact: lab-darras.github.io Based at Zhejiang University 🇨🇳, one of the very best research universities in the world (tinyurl.com/4nb56pv6).
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The Rockefeller University @rockefeller.edu · 27/07/2026
Congrats to Rockefeller's @tomaskay.bsky.social of @danielkronauer.bsky.social's lab, who has been named a 2026 Branco Weiss Fellow! Tomas investigates how cooperation and competition shape the evolution of animal societies, aiming to identify the traits that determine evolutionary success.
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The Rockefeller University @rockefeller.edu · 21/07/2026
In The Scientist: @danielkronauer.bsky.social's lab identifies two evolutionary ancient neuropeptides in the ant brain that modulate parental behavior in opposite directions: One increases the tendency to nurse and be close to larvae, while the other promotes foraging.
the-scientist.com
Ancient Neuropeptides Shape Modern Ant Parental Care | The Scientist
​By repurposing ancient feeding signals, clonal raider ants coordinate brood care and foraging, offering new insights into the evolution of social behavior.
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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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Tomas Kay @tomaskay.bsky.social · 08/07/2026
In an article published today, we show that ancient feeding-related neuropeptides have been repurposed to control brood care in clonal raider ants. Photo: Bart Zijlstra, UNIL /1
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Tomas Kay @tomaskay.bsky.social · 24/06/2026
I keep thinking back to this worm snake. Found under a rock in the back garden of an Air bnb during recent a fire ant collection trip to Athens, Georgia. They have extremely limited vision - check the rudimentary eyes - and a diet of 100% worm
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Hugo Darras @hugodarras.bsky.social · 30/12/2025
Apply for a PhD position in the Pan lab @miyapan.bsky.social at MPI Biology 🇩🇪 to study the molecular mechanisms and evolution of sex determination in haplodiploid insects 🐜🐝.
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Miya Qiaowei Pan @miyapan.bsky.social · 01/12/2025
Excited to share that I’m starting a research group at MPI for Biology Tübingen — and we’re recruiting PhD students! We are offering two fully funded PhD positions on sex determination and development in Hymenoptera 🐜🐝. Please share with prospective students who might be interested.
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Tomas Kay @tomaskay.bsky.social · 20/11/2025
Excited about the prospect of being able to automatically annotate ant behaviour without going via pose estimation, which struggles in the situations we care most about
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Daniel Kronauer @danielkronauer.bsky.social · 04/11/2025
New article from the lab out today, in which we discuss how social behavior evolves at the molecular level. From parenting across the animal tree of life to caste systems in social insects, it’s all connected (and, therefore, slowly starts to make sense)…
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Tomas Kay @tomaskay.bsky.social · 04/11/2025
Parental care, and more complex cooperative systems of care, have independently evolved in hundreds of animal lineages. In an article published today, we explore how these behaviors evolve 𝘢𝘵 𝘢 𝘮𝘰𝘭𝘦𝘤𝘶𝘭𝘢𝘳 𝘭𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘭l shorturl.at/g5OPw /1
shorturl.at
Convergent evolution of a conserved molecular network underlies parenting and sociality - Nature Reviews Genetics
Kay et al. review evidence that parental care, and more complex social behaviour based on parental care, evolved in multiple species through the repeated co-option of members of a pleiotropic molecula...
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Leah Houri-Zeevi @leahhouri.bsky.social · 28/10/2025
What does mating look like when you only have a single shot at getting it right? Very excited to share our work on an almost-invisible female control, rapidly evolving mating recognition systems, and species that break the rules and take over the world. IN MOSQUITOES>
The male genitalia of an 𝘈𝘦𝘥𝘦𝘴 𝘢𝘭𝘣𝘰𝘱𝘪𝘤𝘵𝘶𝘴 mosquito
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Hugo Darras @hugodarras.bsky.social · 29/09/2025
@AntCommunity 🐜 🐜 Chengyuan Liu found a Camponotus ant colony where all sexual larvae have red spots of various sizes, but worker larvae don’t. Any idea what this is?🤔 Video in the comment.
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Tomas Kay @tomaskay.bsky.social · 26/09/2025
Playing hide-and-seek with saltmarsh sparrows at Plumb beach: This East coast endemic inhabits coastal salt marshes and is endangered by habitat loss
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Tomas Kay @tomaskay.bsky.social · 13/07/2025
These two mourning geckos looked like they were mating outside my hotel room in Gamboa, Panama. They are both female. The mourning gecko is an all female species that engages in pseudo-copulation to stimulate egg laying. Not sure I’ve knowingly seen female-female mounting before.
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Tomas Kay @tomaskay.bsky.social · 12/07/2025
A 𝘾𝙚𝙥𝙝𝙖𝙡𝙤𝙩𝙚𝙨 𝙖𝙩𝙧𝙖𝙩𝙪𝙨 worker with a strepsipteran parasite in its abdomen. Male strepsipterans look like normal insects but females are neotenic, retaining larval form throughout their lives. Females implant themselves into the abdomens of other insects & expose their anterior tip /1
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Tomas Kay @tomaskay.bsky.social · 11/07/2025
(1) A moulting Cicada. (2) Moulding is a vulnerable moment - a moulting cicada getting eaten alive by big-headed ants. And (3) aduldhood also dangerous! A cicada in the mouth of a broad-billed motmot. Over the past few days in Panama.
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Tomas Kay @tomaskay.bsky.social · 03/06/2025
Central Park is full of active Robin's nests at the moment. This one is at eye-level on the North side of the Pool @birdcpk.bsky.social
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Tomas Kay @tomaskay.bsky.social · 25/05/2025
An American oystercatcher feeding its chick today at Rockaway beach, NY.
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Tomas Kay @tomaskay.bsky.social · 19/05/2025
No kiss required to turn this pickerel frog into a prince. Catskills, NY.
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Tomas Kay @tomaskay.bsky.social · 19/05/2025
What a snake!
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Tomas Kay @tomaskay.bsky.social · 29/01/2025
One of two wrentits rehydrating at a dripping pipe in Mission Trails, California. These are endemic to west coast scrubland, from Oregon south to Baja California, and are the only New World representative of the Parrotbills. They form lifelong pair bonds.
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Tomas Kay @tomaskay.bsky.social · 12/12/2024
Pink-footed geese wintering in Norfolk, where they form flocks of thousands and feed on post-harvest sugar beet tops.
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