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Reposted by Lara S. Burchardt

Anna N Osiecka 🍉 @aosiecka.bsky.social · 1d

Brilliant work on the ontogeny of rhythm in zebra finches. "Shared rhythm goes beyond copying the temporal features of individual elements; tutees ...adjust the rhythm of non-shared intervals". 🔊 @lsburchardt.bsky.social & al: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Client Challenge

www.nature.com

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Lara S. Burchardt @lsburchardt.bsky.social · 2d

This could hint at two evolutionary strategies:
🐢 one favoring rhythmic precision and consistency,
🦜 the other favoring novelty and flexibility.
So now we’d love to test whether female finches prefer rhythmic accuracy or creativity — does rhythm consistency matter for attractiveness? 🎧🐦
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Lara S. Burchardt @lsburchardt.bsky.social · 2d

We also found intriguing differences between tutees:
🎶 Those who copied all elements of a motif sang slower, more consistent rhythms.
🎶 Those who improvised more in terms of element sequence showed faster, less consistent rhythms.
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Lara S. Burchardt @lsburchardt.bsky.social · 2d

So, what’s happening?
It seems the shared rhythm goes beyond copying individual notes. Tutees might adjust the timing of new, improvised parts so the entire motif still matches their tutor’s rhythm.
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Lara S. Burchardt @lsburchardt.bsky.social · 2d

Turns out they do — but with a twist🥨.
Tutees’ overall rhythms were most similar to their own tutors’, only when considering the full motif.
When we looked at just the shared or non-shared elements, those rhythms diverged.
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Lara S. Burchardt @lsburchardt.bsky.social · 2d

Young zebra finches are known to copy their tutors’ songs — but do they also copy rhythm? 🐦🎶
We analyzed how 37 young males matched the rhythmic structure of their 17 tutors’ songs, focusing on Inter-Onset-Intervalls between elements of song motifs.
👉 doi.org/10.1038/s415...
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doi.org

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Lara S. Burchardt @lsburchardt.bsky.social · 2d

🔊3 years in the making OUT NOW & #OA: "Zebra finch tutees not only share the melody but also the rhythm of their tutor’s song" in #ScientificReports together with Judith Varkevisser and Michelle Spierings, APCs covered by #projectDEAL.
#bioacoustics #rhythm #zebrafinch #AnimalBehavior
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Reposted by Lara S. Burchardt

Sarab Sethi @sarabssethi.bsky.social · 6d

Bugg is now available through GroupGets! groupgets.com/products/bug...

Real-time acoustic monitoring devices, tested from the Arctic to the tropics over long (1y+) deployments - with no maintenance!

Say goodbye to fiddly SD card retrievals and hello to instant ecological insights

Bugg v4 - Pre-Order

Bugg is the world’s first real-time bioacoustic monitoring device. Once set up, sit back and watch as live audio data streams in over months and years with almost no maintenance required.

groupgets.com

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Reposted by Lara S. Burchardt

Anna N Osiecka 🍉 @aosiecka.bsky.social · Sep 15

🔊 This the season! Looking or two MSc students to tackle
1. vocal efficiency across pipit species
and, surpsingly,
2. vocal tract anatomy of the great cormorant (bonus: I also have the heads to model hearing!)

Drop me a line! I love people! :)

docs.google.com/document/d/1...

MSc project

MSc thesis projects in animal communication Laws of brevity across pipit (Anthus) species Across many human languages, there are several general principles in temporal patterning: most frequent word...

docs.google.com

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Reposted by Lara S. Burchardt

wimpouw @wimpouw.bsky.social · 8d

At this workshop today about where hand gestures get their rhythm from - participants can join online.

sfb1252.uni-koeln.de/veranstaltun...

Poster for this event: https://sfb1252.uni-koeln.de/veranstaltungen/internationale-tagungen-workshops/beatology

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Reposted by Lara S. Burchardt

Zack Labe @zacklabe.com · 26d

I’m often asked for temperature anomaly plots using a “pre-industrial” baseline (1850–1900). I update a full set of these graphics each month, now through August 2025: zacklabe.com/climate-chan.... Always free to use and share!

Climate change indicators

All data are referenced at My visualizations: Arctic Climate Seasonality and Variability Arctic Sea Ice Extent and Concentration Arctic Sea Ice Volume and Thickness Arctic Temperatures Antarctic Se…

zacklabe.com

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Reposted by Lara S. Burchardt

Jess Calarco @jessicacalarco.com · Sep 8

Ironically, it appears that AI chatbots hallucinate for the same reason that students feel compelled to use them:

They were socialized in a high-stakes testing culture that rewards guessing and maybe getting it right over admitting when there's something you just don't know.

Why Language Models Hallucinate, by Kalai et al.

Like students facing hard exam questions, large language models sometimes guess when
uncertain, producing plausible yet incorrect statements instead of admitting uncertainty. Such
“hallucinations” persist even in state-of-the-art systems and undermine trust. We argue that
language models hallucinate because the training and evaluation procedures reward guessing over
acknowledging uncertainty, and we analyze the statistical causes of hallucinations in the modern
training pipeline. Hallucinations need not be mysterious—they originate simply as errors in binary
classification. If incorrect statements cannot be distinguished from facts, then hallucinations
in pretrained language models will arise through natural statistical pressures. We then argue
that hallucinations persist due to the way most evaluations are graded—language models are
optimized to be good test-takers, and guessing when uncertain improves test performance. This
“epidemic” of penalizing uncertain responses can only be addressed through a socio-technical
mitigation: modifying the scoring of existing benchmarks that are misaligned but dominate
leaderboards, rather than introducing additional hallucination evaluations. This change may
steer the field toward more trustworthy AI systems.

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Reposted by Lara S. Burchardt

Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics @mpi-nl.bsky.social · Sep 8

A harbor seal (Phoca vitulina) shows extensive respiratory control in sound production. New paper by @diandraduengen.bsky.social , Yannick Jadoul & @andrearavignani.bsky.social
doi.org/10.1186/s12862-025-02404-9

A harbor seal (Phoca vitulina) shows extensive respiratory control in sound production - BMC Ecology and Evolution

The duration of animal vocalizations varies between and within species. Which mammals can learn to control this duration? Such respiratory production learning is a scarcely studied subcomponent of voc...

doi.org

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Reposted by Lara S. Burchardt

Anna N Osiecka 🍉 @aosiecka.bsky.social · Sep 8

Yay bioacousticians all around! <3 Come see me at the #IBAC session tomorrow - or anytime for coffee/bikes!

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Reposted by Lara S. Burchardt

Animal Behaviour Live @animalbehaviour.live · Sep 2

⏳ Time is ticking… Only 5 days left!

Don’t miss your chance to share your work at #ABL2025, our free online conference on animal behavior research.

🎤 15-min oral talks
🎥 5-min video posters
📅 Deadline: September 7
📄 Submit your abstract now 👉 ablaoc25.sciencesconf.org

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Reposted by Lara S. Burchardt

SORTEE @sortee.bsky.social · Aug 1

📷 The 2025 SORTEE conference program is now online!

Visit sortee.org/upcoming/ to register and explore the exciting lineup of various sessions.

#SORTEE2025

If you know a great open science project, now is the time to nominate it for a SORTEE Award www.sortee.org/awards/

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Lara S. Burchardt @lsburchardt.bsky.social · Aug 15

Thanks @animal-prattle.bsky.social for reminding me to post about this project🐋🎵
Mia Davitt (+ col), musician from 🇺🇸, attempted to transcribe whale sounds in Western musical style. Turns out to work quite well, so we #preprint ed these interesting results: osf.io/preprints/os...
#OSF #bioacoustics

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Reposted by Lara S. Burchardt

Anna Abalkina @abalkina.bsky.social · Aug 3

Great initiative by Wiley! The publisher has started marking retracted papers in reference lists. When you click on the retraction notice, you can also see the date and reason for the retraction.
All publishers should adopt this practice. But also screen references during submission.

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Reposted by Lara S. Burchardt

Stephanie L King @stephanielking.bsky.social · Jul 31

Excited to share that we have just been awarded a NERC Pushing the Frontiers grant to work on between-group cooperation in the Shark Bay dolphins. We will soon advertise a 3 year post-doc to join the team - drop me an email if you might be interested! Pls share widely 🙏🏻

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Reposted by Lara S. Burchardt

Daniella Teixeira @daniteixeira.bsky.social · Jul 29

I'm excited to share our new (in press) paper on vocal individuality and acoustic recognition. We looked at Red-tailed Black-Cockatoos, Little Penguins, Little Owls, Tree Pipits and Chiffchaffs, with promising results. #bioacoustics #vocalindividuality www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Acoustic recognition of individuals in closed and open bird populations

Passive acoustic monitoring is firmly established as an effective non-invasive technique for wildlife monitoring. The analysis of animal vocalizations…

www.sciencedirect.com

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Reposted by Lara S. Burchardt

Daniella Teixeira @daniteixeira.bsky.social · Jul 3

#bioacoustics community: do you know any online platforms for volunteers to join an acoustics project, validate and label acoustic data (e.g. birdnet detections, false negatives), filter for specific species etc? I asked this a few yrs ago but nothing of the sort existed...

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Reposted by Lara S. Burchardt

Giles @gdeejay.bsky.social · Jul 1

Hey #rstats,

What's your rule for splitting R scripts that form part of a wider analysis pipeline / project?

I usually write a single script which includes sections for each step from data cleaning to the final results, but it can become unwieldy when the script becomes long.
...

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Reposted by Lara S. Burchardt

Stephanie L King @stephanielking.bsky.social · Jun 15

We are looking for a Research Assistant to contribute to our ongoing analysis of dolphin acoustic data from West Wales - collaboration between @wtsww.bsky.social @bristolbiosci.bsky.social 🐬
Deadline is 29th June - please share widely!
www.bristol.ac.uk/jobs/find/de...

Details | Working at Bristol | University of Bristol

www.bristol.ac.uk

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Reposted by Lara S. Burchardt

Iris Bontekoe @irisdb.bsky.social · Jun 18

🚨 New paper alert! 🚨
Excited to share our new review in @royalsocietypublishing.org Proceedings B! 🎉

We synthesize research on social factors influencing animal migration and offer guidelines for future research. Check it out here: doi.org/10.1098/rspb...

#OpenAccess #Migration #MovementEcology

The study of social animal migrations: a synthesis of the past and guidelines for future research | Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences

Seasonal migration is a common behaviour seen in many species worldwide. There is evidence that social factors influence various migration decisions, but compared to the well-studied field of social f...

doi.org

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Lara S. Burchardt @lsburchardt.bsky.social · Jun 18

We use 9 temporal parameters of individual songs🎵, one of which is #integerratios. We use slightly adjusted calculations🧮, comparing not only adjacent intervals but all interval pairs in a sequence, making sure we report global rather than local similarities of intervals between onsets of syllables.