Blair Costelloe
Behavioral ecologist using drones to study collective behavior of African ungulates. Leader of HerdHover project and co-PI of WildDrone project. Project Leader at the Max Planck Institute for Animal Behavior, currently on TT job market. She/her.
- Reposted by Blair CostelloeYes please
- Reposted by Blair CostelloeNew 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 👇
- Reposted by Blair CostelloeExcited 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 👍
- Reposted by Blair CostelloeBIG FIGHT AT POLAND’S WROCLAW ZOO!!!
- Reposted by Blair CostelloeThey’re stealing from us. They are stealing from us and we have to put a stop to this. This cannot stand.
- Reposted by Blair CostelloeThe 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.
- Reposted by Blair CostelloeAn absolute bedrock institution for understanding how the planet works, just civilization-scaled vandalism by the most incurious morons on Earth
- Reposted by Blair CostelloeHave 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
- Reposted by Blair CostelloeNew 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...
- Reposted by Blair Costelloe🚨 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...
- 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 🧪👩🔬🌍
- Reposted by Blair Costelloe@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! 🐝🐜🦟🦂🐠🐟🐬🦎🐸🦆🐿️🦓
- Reposted by Blair CostelloeFERAL 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.
- So impressed with this software! Check it out!
- 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.
- Reposted by Blair CostelloeGive 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
- Reposted by Blair CostelloeOur 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)
- Reposted by Blair CostelloeThe 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.
- Reposted by Blair CostelloeOpportunity to join our team. Open to African students at Masters or PhD level.
- Reposted by Blair CostelloeI 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.
- Reposted by Blair CostelloeWe 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.
- Reposted by Blair CostelloeI 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)
- Reposted by Blair Costelloe🍂 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...
- Reposted by Blair CostelloeI 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...
- 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! 🧪🌍
- Reposted by Blair CostelloeHot 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 👇
- 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)
- Reposted by Blair CostelloeHumans 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 Blair CostelloeThis 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.
- Reposted by Blair CostelloeChoose 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
- Reposted by Blair CostelloePostdoc job alert! I'm hiring a 3-yr postdoc to work on our Social Modifiers of Primate Lifespans grant. Job info and how to apply below. Deadline June 1. Pls share! jobs.exeter.ac.uk/hrpr_webrecr...
- Reposted by Blair Costelloe🚨 Cool new project alert 🚨 WE- you, me, everyone- need to work together to get important science messages out to people. 4 artists & 3 scientists collab'd on these posters. We hope YOU will put them out in your community. Each poster comes w/info about each topic. Get 'em Squidfacts.bigcartel.com
- Reposted by Blair CostelloeThe outcome of our @asab.org Interdisciplinary Workshop (a great initiative! see www.asab.org/workshop-gra... for funding support) is now published. Led by @marinapapa.bsky.social and me, with contributions from all workshop participants as co-authors! paper: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
- Reposted by Blair CostelloeTwo Senior Marine Ornithologist posts at the Marine Directorate of the Scottish Government. Deadline for applications is 21/04/2025, 23:59 #seabirds #ornithology #renewables fa-evxn-saasfaukgovprod1.fa.ocs.oraclecloud.com/hcmUI/Candid...
- Reposted by Blair Costelloe
[This post could not be retrieved] - Reposted by Blair CostelloeFollow us on social media! BlueSky and Instagram will be our new main accounts. Check back for conference information, outreach, and opportunities for involvement in ABS :)
- Reposted by Blair CostelloeLooking forward to taking part in this Women in Data Science event next Friday, March 7th! More info and registration here: widscambridge.org
- Reposted by Blair Costelloe‼️Save the date‼️The new Max Planck #Postdoc Program kicks off its first call for applications from April 1, 2025; applications can be submitted until May 13, 2025. mpg.de/en/max-planc... #ScienceCareer
- Reposted by Blair CostelloeWe have two openings for stipended ugrad fellows at the Conservation Technology Lab at the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance. One is in CV/ML for field camera systems: us242.dayforcehcm.com/CandidatePor... Second is in field device design (image or sound): us242.dayforcehcm.com/CandidatePor...
- Reposted by Blair CostelloePls share: Konstanz School of Collective behavior from 21st July - 8th August. Application deadline: April, 15. An amazing line up of speakers spanning all aspects of collective behavior . For info: www.exc.uni-konstanz.de/kscb/ @cbehav.bsky.social @mpi-animalbehav.bsky.social
- Reposted by Blair Costelloe🚨BREAKING. From a program officer at the National Science Foundation, a list of keywords that can cause a grant to be pulled. I will be sharing screenshots of these keywords along with a decision tree. Please share widely. This is a crisis for academic freedom & science.
- Reposted by Blair Costelloe1/ Exactly this 🎯 I’ve had many conversations & email exchanges in the past few days with people worried their entire programs will grind to a halt. multiple jobs are on the line in in-country programmes. The Musk-Trump combo could be disastrous for tackling #IWT in the longer term
- Reposted by Blair CostelloeFind out more about the WildDrone project here 👉 wilddrone.eu
- Reposted by Blair Costelloe🌍🐾 Greetings from Kenya! I'm here doing fieldwork with the #WildDroneEU Hackathon. We're an interdisciplinary research collaboration working to develop autonomous drones for wildlife conservation. Excited to share this adventure! 🚁📸🦓 #AI4Wildlife #FieldworkDiaries #ConservationTech #OlPejeta
- Reposted by Blair CostelloeJust 3 more weeks to apply for the Princeton EEB Fellows Program! 🌵🦥🦩🦠🧫🌻Please identify at least 2 faculty collaborators, craft your research program, & apply here: puwebp.princeton.edu/AcadHire/app... @sse-evolution.bsky.social @asn-amnat.bsky.social @eseb.bsky.social Please repost &/or apply!
- Reposted by Blair CostelloeWe have to define what we mean by “AI.” Because the model that advanced our understanding of protein folding and the LLMs that churn out the nonsense slop that fills the internet both get called “AI.” And the latter is co-opting the usefulness of the former to create this exactly perception.
- AI generated imagery is an automatic block for me
- Reposted by Blair CostelloeOn the left, my image. On the right, the Al image that was clearly trained on, and designed to plagiarize, my image. All Al generated imagery is inherently theft. It's unethical, environmentally disastrous, and does irreparable harm to both artists and society.
- Reposted by Blair Costelloe🧪🌎
- Reposted by Blair Costelloe🎯 How can we empower scientific discovery in millions of nature photos? Introducing INQUIRE: A benchmark testing if AI vision-language models can help scientists find biodiversity patterns- from disease symptoms to rare behaviors- hidden in vast image collections. Thread👇🧵
- Reposted by Blair Costelloe5 exciting PhD opportunities to join the Center for Research in Animal Behaviour at the University of Exeter in Sept 2025. www.exeter.ac.uk/research/gro...
- Reposted by Blair CostelloeI'm very excited to offer this #PhD on the majestic Atlantic bluefin #tuna in Southwest UK waters using #drones, remote sensing, #ocean profiling & eDNA! Working with #anglers & this fantastic team: @bd-stew.bsky.social @peterimiller.bsky.social @marinemicrobes.bsky.social 🧪🌊🦑 tinyurl.com/mrxyh62t
- Reposted by Blair Costelloe📢 Edge AI is revolutionizing animal ecology! 🦓🐋 From camera traps to drones, running AI directly on edge devices lets us study wildlife in their natural habitats 🌱 without constant internet. Thrilled to have presented this at #SEC in Rome! 🇮🇹 Read the paper: arxiv.org/abs/2412.01000 #Ecology #EdgeAI
- Reposted by Blair CostelloeWe're hiring!📣 Do you have experience of influencing policy in Brussels at EU and member state level. Do you want to ensure that our EU waters are protected for the benefit of people and the planet? Our EU policy manager role could be for you. Apply 👉 www.bluemarinefoundation.com/vacancy/eu-p...
