Julio Hechavarria

🕷️💤 New paper in time for 🎃! Do #spiders really sleep? In our new study on #Portia fimbriata we tested all behavioural criteria of #sleep and found evidence for regulated, two-stage sleep with recurring REM-like stages. Out in @pnas.org! @roesslerdaniela.bsky.social 📄 tinyurl.com/3fky8ze7 🧵1/9

In our new study, playback experiments revealed sex-specific responses to the same social calls produced during foraging: female nectar-feeding bats were attracted, while males avoided them. Receivers matter! doi.org/10.1111/nyas... Thanks to @ralsimon.bsky.social for the beautiful video!

@neuroethology.org for those who teach neuroethology classes. Which book do you use or which reviews that are related to your research give a good overview of the topic?

My journey from the eminently decipherable retina to the entangled mess that is the mammalian motor system. No turning back now. !https://www.thetransmitter.org/methods/what-to-do-when-traditional-mechanistic-approaches-no-longer-work/

#JNeurosci: How do birds decipher information from their songs? Ahmadi et al. found that neurons in the primary auditory forebrain of birds synchronously respond to salient sounds from birdsong to comprehend messages from this form of communication. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2108-25.2026

Check out this new amazing paper from the Yartsev lab in which they analyze neuronal population dynamics of the 🦇 motor cortex during flight! They identify that the dynamics are high-dimensional, in contrast to experiments performed in restrained conditions. Have a look! www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

Hi all ! The BBB seminar series is back (after a brief pause) with two reptile talks this friday october 16th at 10AM EST !! registration info at braincoustics.com Hope to see you there! 🐊

As a Heisenberg awarded myself i can only recommend this. The Heisenberg programm is a fantastic opportunity and opens many doors!

Supra-regular recursion in primate vocal sequences https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.09.19.752870v1

Interested in doing a PhD in philosophy of animal minds in lovely Murcia? We have just published a call for expressions of interest to do a PhD as part of our research project on ecological validity in comparative cognitive science. Please consider applying if this is up your street!

🚨Last day to vote 🚨 Dear #ISN members, until TOMORROW you have the chance to have a say in the future leadership of our society and you can choose you favourite site for #ISN2030 - Vienna 🇦🇹 or Los Angeles 🇺🇲? Please vote 🗳 if you have not alredy done so and share widely 🤗 #Neuroethology 🧠🧪

Amazing work led by @nickjourjine.bsky.social showing how the species-specific temporal structure of neonatal vocalizations in deer mice can be traced back to cerebellar anatomy & maybe even to a genomic locus containing plausible gene candidates [e.g ASTN2, well studied by @mbhatten.bsky.social ]🧪

The call for the second funding period of the Priority Programm investigating cortico-subcortical interactions in mammals is now published at the DFG's website. Check it out! I will be the speaker for this second funding period, so in case of questions just reach out :)

Online now: Evolutionary spandrels in collective animal behaviour

Your breathing and your brainwaves match shape, breath by breath. Cycle-by-cycle respiration waveforms are coupled with the shape of neural oscillations www.jneurosci.org/content/earl... #neuroscience

🚨 I AM HIRING a 3-year postdoc & 4-year PhD student 🚨 [PLEASE SHARE WIDELY] My Emmy Noether @dfg.de funded Neural Circuit & Systems Evolution lab (🌟) at the @unimainz.bsky.socialÍ wants to start existing. So..., what do we need? WELL... we need you! APPLY UNTIL 21 SEPTEMBER.

The Ferrier Medal and Lecture 2027 is awarded to Professor Kenneth Daniel Harris for his contributions to neuroscience by unifying experimental neurophysiology with advanced analytical methods and for pioneering methods that allow recording from thousands of neurons. #RSMedals https://bit.ly/4qCJZRo

New preprint 🧠🗣️ We recorded intracranial activity while people told stories freely. The brain commits to sentence structure early: syntactic depth and core categories (nouns, verbs) are encoded ~1s before articulation, while adjectives and adverbs are specified only ~0.5s out. Check it out!

📢 We are hiring a full professor in "Intelligence in Biological and Artificial Systems". Come join us at Germany's first and largest cognitive science program. Please share far and wide, and get in touch with any questions. www.uni-osnabrueck.de/en/universit...

Very excited to see our preprint out! 🦇 We show that bats time their echolocation calls to brief dips in rhythmic noise, helping them avoid acoustic jamming. Check it out!

Our latest preprint is now live! We show that wild and lab-raised bats time their echolocation calls to the dips of rhythmic broadband noise to prevent jamming. Precise dip echolocation disappears when frontal areas are treated with GABA agonist muscimol. Great work by @shivanihari.bsky.social et al

I’m very excited to finally share our new PNAS paper! 🦇 🔈🧪 We show that freely flying, echolocating bats aim both ears at prey, sacrificing some binaural level cues to create a narrow acoustic field of view, boosting weak target echoes and increasing clutter rejection. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Do you have data on how the neocortex interacts with evolutionary older subcortical areas? Then submit to our collection at @natureportfolio.nature.com Participating journals include @natneuro.nature.com @natcomms.nature.com @commsbio.nature.com and scientific reports!

Neurons don't just fire more for important sounds, their activity becomes more precisely timed and rhythmic Representations of spatial saliency in auditory cortex are selectively organized through temporal coordination www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... #neuroscience

Donald Griffin, discoverer of bat echolocation, was born OTD 1915. I imagine “small mammals enough like ourselves to feel that I could understand what their lives would be like, and yet different enough to make it a sort of adventure and exploration to see what they were doing.” 🐋🌱🧪 #HistSTM

📢 Hi Bluesky, it's us again! If you prefer, submit a 5-min video poster for #ABL2026! Hosted on YouTube with live Q&A on Discord! 📅 Nov 12 | Free, online, worldwide 🌍Studying Behaviour In A Changing World 🔗 Learn more, register, submit Register here: lnkd.in/eGs--Ueq

If you're at #ICN2026 in Vancouver, don't miss JEB Senior Editor, Charlotte Rutledge's talk AI and the future of scientific publishing in the Great Hall at 10:15am on Thursday 30 July

Someone creaated an App to organize your #icn2026 conference schedule 🤩 schedulericn26.netlify.app Share widely, use it and have fun 🤗

🔬📢 Das Graduiertenprogramm PharMetrX: Pharmacometrics & Computational Disease Modelling vergibt Stipendien (FU Berlin/Uni Potsdam) 📅 Bewerbung bis 6. Sept. 2026 – Start März 2027. 👉 Forschungsnähe, Mentoring, Industriepartner, Netzwerk www.pharmetrx.de #PhD #Stipendium #Pharmacometrics #FUBerlin

Our new paper is out in @nature.com! We uncovered how a naked mole-rat queen 👑 controls an entire colony: a natural contraceptive scent that suppresses reproduction in other females! A remarkable mammalian parallel to bees and ants! 🐝🐜 @garyrlewin.bsky.social youtu.be/enfv3zJrWKM?...

25 years ago, we implicated rare variants of the FOXP2 gene in a severe speech disorder. I’ve spent much time stressing that FOXP2, while interesting, is not the mythical “gene for language”. Weirdly, on occasion I also need to explain why it’s not “proof of aliens”. Full disclosure in this 🧵. 1/n 🧪

🔁 LOOPs is at FENS 🎉 we're exited to be represented with several talks by @grohlex.bsky.social, @tobiasstaudigl.bsky.social, and Johannes Letzkus, alongside multiple posters from across the LOOPs consortium. Stay tuned for highlights and updates! #FENS2026 #Neuroscience #SPP2411 #BrainLoops

🔁 LOOPs Webinars! We’ve got an exciting series of talks coming up from leading researchers across neuroscience. Take a look at the schedule below and join us for some fascinating science all year long! 🧠 Don’t miss: June 10th with Dr. Sarah Ruediger 🔗 Register: www.crowdcast.io/c/loops-semi...

Neuropixels + Optogenetics = Neuropixels Opto Combining high-resolution electrophysiology and optogenetics. 960 sites, 28 emitters, 2 colors. Today in @natmethods.nature.com doi.org/10.1038/s415... Thanks to @wellcometrust.bsky.social, @alleninstitute.org, @hhmijanelia.bsky.social & team.

Do not miss the next session of the LOOPS webinar :)

Tympanic hearing is the textbook example to explain hearing. But, many tetrapods lack tympanic middle ear systems. Here, it is modelled whether non-tympanic hearing can be explained with sounds inducing head vibrations that are detected by the inner ear. journals.biologists.com/jeb/article/...

Check out our new paper on how single neurons in the Auditory cortex encode future vocalizations in bats! Really glad to see this out, and big thanks to @susannebabl.bsky.social and Dennis Röhrig

Today starts the 3rd "Senses in Motion" 👀👂👃🤚👅🧭 conference on "Sensory Processing in Freely Moving Animals" in the Harnack Haus in Berlin @maxplanck.de organised by @sepikeshavarzi.bsky.social , @petrznam.bsky.social and Jason Kerr @mpinb.mpg.de 🧠🧪 ↘️ sensesinmotion.org ↙️

Really inspiring and thought-provoking perspective. Thanks for sharing!

🚨 Nominate a neuroethologist for the Mosaic Prize by May 31! The ISN Mosaic Prize seeks to identify and acknowledge individuals in the neuroethology community for their contribution and commitment to making the research environment more inclusive. For more info: www.neuroethology.org/mosaic-prize/

Rethinking hierarchy: the auditory system as an integrated cortical–subcortical network www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The prize that could make ‘talking to the animals’ a reality Scientists are decoding the chirps, squeaks and calls of finches, bonobos and more in pursuit of a $10m award aimed at understanding how animals communicate, James Tapper reports https://bit.ly/4nDelSF

On central circuit control from my lab, in collaboration with @tonyzador.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🚨🔄 New LOOPs webinar!! We’re excited to host our May webinar feat. @jasperpoort.bsky.social as he shares insights on how superior colliculus and visual cortex contribute to visual detection during natural behaviour 🧠✨ 🗓️ May 13th, 2026 ⏰ 16:00h CEST 📍 Register: www.crowdcast.io/c/loops-seminars-v2

My newly funded project is now featured on the FU department website! We explore multisensory processing and decision making in bats through a combination of behavioral experiments in the field and neural recordings in the lab 🌿🦇🧠 So excited to get started! www.bcp.fu-berlin.de/news/_2026/2...

How did singing mouse evolve its song? Two research manuscripts published today shed light on peripheral and central circuit modifications underlying this novel vocal capacity.

Really interesting study. Aerial hunting in bats without the stereotyped, highly conserved final buzz phase is a big surprise!

🗓️‼️Reminder: The deadline for the Assistant Professor position at the University of Puerto Rico is this Thursday. Don’t miss your chance to apply! Details here: sicb.org/jobs-and-fel...

⏰ Big update: deadline extended! Submissions invited for Nature Portfolio’s Loops Collection on circuits, feedback & cortical–subcortical loops, guest-edited by @talking-bat.bsky.social, Markus Rothermel & @stefanieliebe.bsky.social 📅 New deadline: August 19, 2026 🔗 www.nature.com/collections/...

How does the medial posterior parietal cortex contribute to temporal order memory? This study shows that population activity in macaque mPPC encodes evolving temporal context during encoding and synchronized retrieval dynamics that predict order judgments. journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...