Sebastien Moro
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cervelleoiseau.bsky.social
Sebastien Moro
@cervelleoiseau.bsky.social
Vulgarisation scientifique orientée sur le comportement et la cognition animale.
SciComm on animal cognition and behavior.
Specialized in large reviews oO
http://cervelledoiseau.fr
https://youtube.com/cervelledoiseau
#Fish #Rats #Pigeons #FarmAnimals #Bee
Pinned
For a fresh new start here, here is a TEDx Talk I gave a few months ago on animal intelligence.
It's in French but there are English subtitles :)
youtu.be/Eqm4ZF07xG0
#Ethology #AnimalBehavior #AnimalBehaviour
Des intelligences extraterrestres ... bien terrestres - Sébastien Moro-TEDx Arts Et Metiers Bordeaux
YouTube video by Cervelle d'oiseau
youtu.be
Reposted by Sebastien Moro
Zebrafish facility report on implementation of artificial plants as structural enrichment https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2025.12.04.692061v1
December 9, 2025 at 2:45 AM
Reposted by Sebastien Moro
New preprint out on "Goats who stare at wolves - identifying natural response stimuli for an affect-driven attention bias test in small ruminants"!

Apparently, snakes might be the new wolves!

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Goats who stare at wolves - identifying natural response stimuli for an affect-driven attention bias test in small ruminants
Reliable and non-invasive assessment of affective states is crucial in animal welfare research. Linking affective states to cognitive processes, such as cognitive biases, provides a promising approach...
www.biorxiv.org
December 9, 2025 at 8:35 AM
Reposted by Sebastien Moro
New paper out today w @dalmaijer.bsky.social @barbaraklump.bsky.social and @lucymaplin.bsky.social as part of the Phil Trans special issue doi.org/10.1098/rstb.... Over 2 years, we studied a population of cockatoos thought to be the source of the innovation of bin-opening.
December 4, 2025 at 1:31 PM
Reposted by Sebastien Moro
1/4 Positive and negative moods in cockroaches

Cockroaches change their mood depending on recent experiences: they become more pessimistic after exposure to light and more optimistic after perceiving an attractive smell.

(preprint) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
December 6, 2025 at 6:25 PM
Reposted by Sebastien Moro
Goats who stare at wolves - identifying natural response stimuli for an affect-driven attention bias test in small ruminants https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2025.12.03.692016v1
December 7, 2025 at 1:45 AM
Reposted by Sebastien Moro
1/4 Cockatoos are winning the trash can war against Australians

Human motivation to protect them falls five times faster than cockatoos' motivation to open them, and increasing protections makes cockatoos better at it.

(paper) royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/article...
December 7, 2025 at 11:21 AM
Reposted by Sebastien Moro
Putting humans with paranoid schizophrenia through an experiment (Animal-Assisted Therapy with a donkey), with no human ethical oversight of the research. [courtesy of #mdpi] #ResearchEthics #HumanEthics 🔽
"experimental... included 10 patients..., with an average age of 55.44 +/− 6.10, a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia"

"Institutional Review Board Statement Ethical review and approval were waived for this study, because the procedure was non-invasive" www.mdpi.com/2306-7381/12... #mdpi
www.mdpi.com
December 8, 2025 at 7:25 AM
Reposted by Sebastien Moro
Pessimistic and optimistic cognitive biases in cockroaches https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2025.12.01.691180v1
December 2, 2025 at 8:45 PM
Reposted by Sebastien Moro
2025. Distress calls as social stressors affecting chicken welfare. (Biology Letters, in press) www.researchgate.net/publication/...
Distress calls as social stressors affecting chicken welfare | Request PDF
Request PDF | Distress calls as social stressors affecting chicken welfare | (in press; Biology Letters) Social signals about current environmental risks can shape development in young animals. Distre...
www.researchgate.net
November 29, 2025 at 4:30 AM
Reposted by Sebastien Moro
Wondering if insects feel pain? Here's our critique of work that looked at this in bees. We were unconvinced of the evidence, and built a model to think through these issues.

Their response is published alongside and we'll have a response to that out soon.

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Motivational trade-offs as evidence for sentience in bees: a critique
www.sciencedirect.com
November 25, 2025 at 5:59 PM
Reposted by Sebastien Moro
Searching for a Christmas gift? Songs, barks, roars, hoots, squeals, and growls: exploring the mysteries of how animals communicate by sound (2025 paperback edition).

press.princeton.edu/books/paperb...
#bioacoustics #animals #language #voice #communication #sounds #behavior #biology
The Voices of Nature
Songs, barks, roars, hoots, squeals, and growls: exploring the mysteries of how animals communicate by sound
press.princeton.edu
November 25, 2025 at 9:21 PM
Reposted by Sebastien Moro
2025. Emotional contexts influence vocal individuality in ungulates. by @ebriefer.bsky.social & team. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Emotional contexts influence vocal individuality in ungulates
For group-living animals, such as most ungulates, the ability to recognize members of one's social group is crucial. While vocalizations often carry c…
www.sciencedirect.com
November 27, 2025 at 3:19 AM
Reposted by Sebastien Moro
Acute Stress in Female Adolescent Rats Increases Anxiety-like but not Depression-like Behaviors https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.11.20.689244v1
November 21, 2025 at 11:45 PM
Reposted by Sebastien Moro
Bees attend primarily to costs, not benefits, to avoid exploitation by floral mimics https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.11.20.689644v1
November 21, 2025 at 11:45 AM
Reposted by Sebastien Moro
Here's a novel idea for 2025 & beyond: Animal sciences conferences should require an #Ethics declaration with every abstract submitted for potential presentation. #ResearchIntegrity #AnimalEthics #HumanEthics
November 21, 2025 at 9:08 AM
What a surprising conclusion :D
November 21, 2025 at 10:47 AM
Reposted by Sebastien Moro
🔽
2025. Fatal Flaws are Ingrained in Laboratory Animal Research-But who cares? "we conducted a structured review of animal experiments published in North America and Europe in 2022... not even one followed the principles of rigorous experimental design." communities.springernature.com/posts/fatal-...
Fatal Flaws are Ingrained in Laboratory Animal Research - But who cares?
When we began looking closely at laboratory animal experiments, we found that despite the enormous time, cost, and care involved, studies had biased designs. The problem appeared systemic. We set out ...
communities.springernature.com
November 20, 2025 at 11:58 PM
Reposted by Sebastien Moro
Social attraction mediates collective foraging decisions in invasive hornets https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.11.20.689504v1
November 21, 2025 at 1:45 AM
Reposted by Sebastien Moro
Loved this paper by @kristinandrews.bsky.social and Noam Miller. A very convincing argument for the function of consciousness.
The social origins of consciousness | Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
We present the social origins of consciousness hypothesis, according to which the ability to coordinate with group members was the original adaptive function of consciousness. We offer three arguments...
royalsocietypublishing.org
November 18, 2025 at 12:07 PM
Reposted by Sebastien Moro
Still pushing my and @abigaildesmond.bsky.social’s term ‘fixel’ for tool-like fixed objects (incl. ropes, vines, anvils, scratching posts, etc.).

Using tools or fixels doesn’t mean any animal is ‘smarter’ than any other. It does tell us about how they perceive what matters in their world.

🏺🧪🛠️🐺🦀
Have wild wolves learned to use tools?
Video captures a lone female pulling crab traps out of the water, but does it count as tool use?
www.science.org
November 18, 2025 at 10:41 AM
Reposted by Sebastien Moro
Hunger, displacement, or play? Object manipulation behaviour in Asian small-clawed otters (Aonyx cinereus) https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.11.14.688474v1
November 17, 2025 at 3:45 PM
Reposted by Sebastien Moro
1/6 Self-awareness could be VERY ancient

In this review, Masanori Kohda argues that the ability to use a mirror to locate objects, which roosters and hens possess, requires the prior ability to recognize oneself.

(paper) royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...
November 15, 2025 at 6:03 PM
Reposted by Sebastien Moro
Do bees see nothing? Primates with damage to the visual cortex have no conscious visual experience, but display adaptive visual behaviour (a phenomenon called blindsight). Here I team up with two primate researchers to ask if bee vision could be similar to blindsight. www.cell.com/trends/cogni...
November 17, 2025 at 9:55 AM
Reposted by Sebastien Moro
Joint attention biases dogs' memory towards object identity https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.11.14.687955v1
November 15, 2025 at 3:45 AM
Merci à toutes et à tous !
Si vous n'avez pas encore participé, il y a encore plein de paliers, et notamment plusieurs pour augmenter le nombre de pages, et donc de découvertes incroyables sur les rats !
November 15, 2025 at 10:12 AM