Amiyaal Ilany
Associate Professor at School of Zoology & the Natural History Museum, Tel Aviv University. Animal sociality, hyraxes
thehyrax.wixsite.com/ilanylab
- Reposted by Amiyaal Ilany🎉 What a way to end the year! Very excited to see our new paper on 🐭 innovation and mate choice out in @currentbiology.bsky.social! doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2025.11.077 With the amazing @fragdarm.bsky.social, @valmazza.bsky.social & Anja Guenther
- I learned a lot from this paper, showing that for most microbes, humans host only one strain in their gut. This implies that we can track strains and their transmission between hosts. I'm wondering if it varies among host species. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- Reposted by Amiyaal Ilany🎉🍾 very excited to see this out before 2025 ends doi.org/10.1111/2041... with Will Hoppitt in @methodsinecoevol.bsky.social. This paper is an overview of our new R package STbayes, a user-friendly toolkit for performing Bayesian NBDA analyses. @cbehav.bsky.social @mpi-animalbehav.bsky.social
- Reposted by Amiyaal IlanyOur newest research in @currentbiology.bsky.social: www.cell.com/current-biol... We find dominant baboons have more interrupted and less rest at night. Author list and story in comments below :-)
- Reposted by Amiyaal IlanyInterested in how life history may shape the gut microbiome of a wild mammal? Keen on getting to work with an iconic long-term study system in Scotland? Check out this PhD opportunity with me, Josephine Pemberton and @gfalbery.bsky.social Reach out to chat more! www.findaphd.com/phds/project...
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- Reposted by Amiyaal IlanyI wrote a little bit about the "missing heritability" question and several recent studies that have brought it to a close. A short 🧵
- Reposted by Amiyaal IlanyAfter the Ngogo chimpanzee group killed 21 members of neighboring groups and expanded their territory by 22%, female birth rates more than doubled and infant survival increased sharply—showing clear fitness benefits from intergroup killing. In PNAS: ow.ly/TKmf50XuPjY
- Reposted by Amiyaal Ilany📢Two fully-funded #PhD opportunities to work with us: Topic: Social monitoring & manipulation UK-domiciled black-heritage scheme: tinyurl.com/aja54nr6 NERC DLTP: tinyurl.com/4jfy47pp Cosupervisors: #PatrickKennedy @ljnbrent.bsky.social @bristolbiosci.bsky.social #bioacoustics #mammals #fieldwork
- Reposted by Amiyaal IlanyNew paper! We propose a framework to empirically study animal social relationships by modelling social network (SN) data as time-series—that is, without the need to aggregate them over time. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
- Reposted by Amiyaal Ilany🚨STOP SCROLLING, IT’S AN EMERGENCY BROADCAST📣 This message will self-destruct in 10…9…8…7…⏰ …now that I have your attention: 🧪Our new paper on Alerting Components in animal vocalization is out in AnimBehav🎉 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... #AnimalBehaviour #Bioacoustics #Communication
- Reposted by Amiyaal Ilany‼️ Thrilled to share my first article on the Kalahari meerkats ‼️, in @animalecology.bsky.social! Group membership strongly influences gut microbiomes & especially the co-occurrence of beneficial bacteria, beyond animals' age or sex, disease status, or environmental exposure doi.org/10.1111/1365...
- New paper, led by Vlad Demartsev: Alerting components in animal vocalization www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
- Reposted by Amiyaal IlanyI am looking for a postdoc to work in our long-term system of food-caching mountain chickadees in the Sierra Nevada mountains. The expected start is April 2026. Please see details here: chickadeecognition.com/positions If interested and qualified, please contact me directly (email on the website).
- Reposted by Amiyaal IlanyExciting new work from former team members Eric Romero, Cwyn Solvi, Fei Peng and colleagues makes the cover of Science: affective contagion in bumblebees! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
- Reposted by Amiyaal IlanyExcited to share our new paper on the #social #structure of Rwenzori #colobus multi-male, multi-female core units! We found 3 different patterns but close #male #relationships in all that were long lasting! Paper is behind a paywall but contact us if you want a pdf. link.springer.com/article/10.1...
- Reposted by Amiyaal IlanySocial relationships are powerful predictors of fitness across social animals. But *why*? In our new @cp-trendsecolevo.bsky.social paper, we outline testable predictions for why relationship quality and quantity adaptively vary across socio-ecological contexts. tinyurl.com/55dnkeh7
- Reposted by Amiyaal IlanyIn 2018, Charles Murray challenged me to a bet: "We will understand IQ genetically—I think most of the picture will have been filled in by 2025—there will still be blanks—but we’ll know basically what’s going on." It's now 2025, and I claim a win. I write about it in The Atlantic.
- Reposted by Amiyaal IlanyTrying to work from home with my kids around
- New paper, led by Luciano Atzeni: Using spatially explicit individual-based modelling to evaluate the ecological feasibility of big cat reintroduction: the example of the Arabian leopard www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
- War is over, so here's a great fellowship to do a postdoc in Israel. Get in touch if interested: azrielifoundation.org/azrieli-fell...
- Reposted by Amiyaal Ilany⭐PhD position available!⭐ Come join us @imprs-qbee.bsky.social to study communication and collective behavior in animal groups! We're looking for someone excited to use computational approaches to tackle biological questions, using our full-group tracking datasets imprs-qbee.mpg.de/121465/analy...
- Reposted by Amiyaal IlanyI'm v excited to be recruiting a PhD student to work on badger behaviour and ecology! Starting date is March 2026; see the ad here, or message me for more details: www.gregalbery.me/s/March-2026...
- Amazing days at the Sinharaja rainforest, Sri Lanka, and saw a loris!
- Reposted by Amiyaal IlanyThis is an awe-inspiring and fascinating study that I thoroughly enjoyed reading. However, the overall framing in terms of "innate versus learned” is unnecessary. The innate versus acquired dichotomy is outdated and has been for a long time. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- Reposted by Amiyaal Ilany🌍🦋 Across 6 continents, 21 sites & 15,000 paper moths, we joined a worldwide experiment led by @wlallen.bsky.social & Iliana Medina, showing how ecological context shapes the evolution of animal colouration. Proud to be part of this global team effort: doi.org/10.1126/scie...
- Reposted by Amiyaal IlanyNew preprint out from the lab, including @rroyaute.bsky.social: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... In this we test what we refer to as the "standard model" of behavioral variation. This was inspired by recent work identifying intra-genotypic variation as a major contributor to "individuality". 1/
- New paper, led by Camille Bordes: Social network dynamics under experimental manipulations of predation risk and food abundance in wild rock hyraxes besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
- New paper, led by Camille Bordes: Social network dynamics under experimental manipulations of predation risk and food abundance in wild rock hyraxes
- Reposted by Amiyaal IlanyCrazy discovery in ants 🤯🐜 One mother for two species via obligate cross-species cloning in ants | Nature www.nature.com/articles/s41... "Males from the same mother exhibit distinct genomes and morphologies, as they belong to species that diverged over 5 million years ago."
- A 40C degrees day is perfect for checking some trail cameras in the Judean Desert with @otter-guy.bsky.social
- Reposted by Amiyaal Ilany🐒🕸️ New preprint! Confused about how to model animal social networks? ASNA can be confusing—but also full of opportunity. We break down 5 common misunderstandings in animal social network analysis and share solutions from behavioural ecology, anthro, stats, & network science. Hope it helps! A 🧵
- Reposted by Amiyaal IlanyWe have a new paper out in @cp-iscience.bsky.social reporting that more socially integrated female chimpanzees have lower offspring mortality 🧪 #evosky #primates #primatology #anthropology www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
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- Reposted by Amiyaal Ilanybeen a long time coming, there's now a preprint along with Will Hoppitt describing our new R package for creating, fitting and interpreting bayesian NBDA models (STBayes). www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1.... Documentation is here michaelchimento.github.io/STbayes/inde...
- Reposted by Amiyaal IlanyNew paper in @behavecol.bsky.social (link: academic.oup.com/beheco/advan...) led by PhD student @marcofele.bsky.social using hard-won data from our amazing baboon team. Our @swanseauni.bsky.social press release: www.swansea.ac.uk/press-office... We introduce the idea of a "social spandrel".....
- Reposted by Amiyaal IlanyHumans 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)
- Reposted by Amiyaal Ilany1/3 Chimpanzees combine their vocalizations to create new meanings. They have studied more than 4000 sequences of 53 chimpanzees from Taï (Côte d'Ivoire), and analyzed how combinations (16) of two vocalizations change their function. (paper) www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
- Reposted by Amiyaal IlanyOur latest superb starling work in @nature.com. We observe long-term reciprocal helping relationships, and suggest reciprocity is an underappreciated mechanism promoting the stability of cooperatively breeding societies. Led by Alexis Earl and @gerrycarter.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- Reposted by Amiyaal IlanyIf you're a grad student or an undergrad interested in research I need to you listen to me very carefully. You cannot learn to write good research papers if you do not read good research papers. Stop asking LLMs to summarize papers for you.
- Reposted by Amiyaal IlanyReally excited that our DFG grant on the Speciation Genomics of Eye Size variation in *Heliconius* has been funded :) In the next weeks, I will post an advert for a PhD, but if you know of good students, please suggest they get in touch. Please repost.
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- Reposted by Amiyaal Ilany1/35 New paper out! @jamesTstroud and I dive into why long-term studies are crucial for understanding evolution. They reveal processes impossible to detect in short timescales and capture rare events that transform our understanding of evolutionary dynamics. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- Postdoc fellowships in Israel: azrielifoundation.org/fellows/inte...
- Reposted by Amiyaal IlanyFriends! The science that we love is under threat. World-wide, there're forces seeking to make it corporate-like, focused on deliverables, or even the enemy of society. Take a stand & celebrate science & music! #theconferencetoendallconferences - Registration starts NOW! woodstock.img.cas.cz
- IT'S HAPPENING! The Woodstock of Biology 2.0 meets Night Science @nightsciencepod.bsky.social 10-13 of June in Prague & the Woods of Bohemia... Be there or be REJECTED. #theconferencetoendallconferences
- Reposted by Amiyaal IlanyFINE starts again next week with exciting free online seminars. In its 10th season we will hear about whales, parental care, neuroethology, aging, group-living lizards and much more!
- It was a good hyrax day near the Sea of Galilee
- Reposted by Amiyaal IlanyIT'S HAPPENING! The Woodstock of Biology 2.0 meets Night Science @nightsciencepod.bsky.social 10-13 of June in Prague & the Woods of Bohemia... Be there or be REJECTED. #theconferencetoendallconferences
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- Reposted by Amiyaal IlanyScientists - consider writing up your research for Frontiers for Young Minds (if you are brave enough to face kid reviewers 😉). Here's how: kids.frontiersin.org/participate/... Like Liza Fazio! @lkfazio.bsky.social Or Yann LeCun! @ylecun.bsky.social kids.frontiersin.org/articles/10....
- We wrote a Frontiers for Young Minds article a few years ago and the process was so cool. Really fun to write about a developmental study for kids and to get their feedback. kids.frontiersin.org/articles/10....
- Reposted by Amiyaal Ilany3-year Postdoc Position Join our team @mpi-animalbehav.bsky.social and investigate the dynamics of seasonal songbird migration using biologging technologies See details here: bit.ly/3ZojW38 Please get in touch if interested & share with anyone else who might be!
- Reposted by Amiyaal IlanyExciting new NERC funded PhD opportunity available with us on #killerwhale #orca #behaviour and #conservation, co-supervised by Stephanie King, Sam Ellis and Dan Franks in partnership with The Center for Whale Research USA exeter.ac.uk/study/fundin... - deadline 13th January 2025 #killerwhale
- A nice example of hyrax tusks
- Reposted by Amiyaal IlanyCome do a PhD with Sinead English @englishse.bsky.social , Dan Padfield @padpadpadpad.bsky.social and me on Gulls! GPS- and Bluetooth-tracking! Microbiomes & AMR acquisition & transmission! Human-wildlife conflict & mitigation! should be fun :-)
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- Took a break from grant writing to visit the nearest rock hyrax group, but they were occupied with a "guest"
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- Reposted by Amiyaal IlanyHomophily in social and demographic traits predict association patterns in female western and mountain gorillas royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/abs/10.1...
- Reposted by Amiyaal Ilany* NEW #PhD * #Evolution #Ecology of Immune #Senesence in Wild Badgers - exciting project with me, @btschirren.bsky.social & our awesome collaborators @ APHA. Based at @exetercec.bsky.social in Cornwall, UK. !PLEASE SHARE! See www.animalsocieties.org and apply: www.exeter.ac.uk/study/fundin... 🌏 🧪 🦑
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