Tomas Kay

I wrote a review of clonal raider ant biology and why the species is such a good model system to study various fundamental aspects of social insect biology in the lab. Here is the online early version: www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

In this new preprint, we provide the first characterization of the chemosensory system of an ant larva. The image shows the head of a clonal raider ant larva in which olfactory sensory neurons are stained with an antibody. Spearheaded by MD/PhD student Daniel Pastor. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

New paper from my lab out in Proc B 🎉 : Developmental bias of body size and caste by the fire ant social supergene doi.org/10.1098/rspb... @horacezhl.bsky.social

Excited to share my lab’s latest preprint led by postdoc @yukihaba.bsky.social and grad student Ryan Schwark. We surprisingly find that spontaneous behavior in isolation predicts a naked mole-rat’s identity, its colony membership, and even rank within its colony. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

🩸🩸🩸TODAY WE SHARE TWO MAJOR DISCOVERIES🩸🩸🩸 1. We peered into genomes and brains of the rare mosquitoes that QUIT feeding on blood and found what biting is built from 2. Humans got rid of isoleucine in their blood, malaria suffers from it, and mosquito proteomes budget for it THREADS>

I am excited to announce that I will start the Brain Origins Lab at the Crick in March 2027! Using acoels as a model system, the lab will study how animal brains evolve, and how innovations in brain organisation enable new computational abilities and the evolution of complex behaviour.

FERAL is now agent-friendly! You can train and validate your model and analyze your animal behavior videos through your agent! Together with the introduction of FERAL lite in the previous release, we think this will make FERAL much easier to use! www.getferal.ai www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Very happy to share that the @erc.europa.eu has selected PHYTOPOGON for funding! 😁🌱 In this project, we will test whether plants have greenbeard genes — an evolutionary mechanism that could allow them to recognize the genetic identity of their neighbours.

We're about to start an exciting new project with generous support from the @erc.europa.eu In SIMBIO, we want to know how bacterial endosymbionts modify neurons on the genetic and functional level and how this shapes the evolution of their host's mating behavior.

We are looking for a research assistant to join our team. brain.mpg.de/brand Apply using the link below if you are interested in doing research on the neural and genetic underpinnings of behavioral evolution. jobs.brain.mpg.de/jobposting/6...

Our lab is recruiting 🐜🧬 : - PhD student, functional genomics, Chinese nationals only - Postdocs, population genomics, open internationally Lab info and contact: lab-darras.github.io Based at Zhejiang University 🇨🇳, one of the very best research universities in the world (tinyurl.com/4nb56pv6).

Congrats to Rockefeller's @tomaskay.bsky.social of @danielkronauer.bsky.social's lab, who has been named a 2026 Branco Weiss Fellow! Tomas investigates how cooperation and competition shape the evolution of animal societies, aiming to identify the traits that determine evolutionary success.

In The Scientist: @danielkronauer.bsky.social's lab identifies two evolutionary ancient neuropeptides in the ant brain that modulate parental behavior in opposite directions: One increases the tendency to nurse and be close to larvae, while the other promotes foraging.

FERAL 1.0 is out! Just to remind you: FERAL is an open-source toolkit for supervised animal behaviour segmentation directly from videos with no pose estimation needed. We made it much easier to install and run FERAL First, to install FERAL: pip install feral www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 🧵

I keep thinking back to this worm snake. Found under a rock in the back garden of an Air bnb during recent a fire ant collection trip to Athens, Georgia. They have extremely limited vision - check the rudimentary eyes - and a diet of 100% worm

Apply for a PhD position in the Pan lab @miyapan.bsky.social at MPI Biology 🇩🇪 to study the molecular mechanisms and evolution of sex determination in haplodiploid insects 🐜🐝.

Excited to share that I’m starting a research group at MPI for Biology Tübingen — and we’re recruiting PhD students! We are offering two fully funded PhD positions on sex determination and development in Hymenoptera 🐜🐝. Please share with prospective students who might be interested.

Excited about the prospect of being able to automatically annotate ant behaviour without going via pose estimation, which struggles in the situations we care most about

New article from the lab out today, in which we discuss how social behavior evolves at the molecular level. From parenting across the animal tree of life to caste systems in social insects, it’s all connected (and, therefore, slowly starts to make sense)…

What does mating look like when you only have a single shot at getting it right? Very excited to share our work on an almost-invisible female control, rapidly evolving mating recognition systems, and species that break the rules and take over the world. IN MOSQUITOES>

@AntCommunity 🐜 🐜 Chengyuan Liu found a Camponotus ant colony where all sexual larvae have red spots of various sizes, but worker larvae don’t. Any idea what this is?🤔 Video in the comment.

Playing hide-and-seek with saltmarsh sparrows at Plumb beach: This East coast endemic inhabits coastal salt marshes and is endangered by habitat loss

These two mourning geckos looked like they were mating outside my hotel room in Gamboa, Panama. They are both female. The mourning gecko is an all female species that engages in pseudo-copulation to stimulate egg laying. Not sure I’ve knowingly seen female-female mounting before.

(1) A moulting Cicada. (2) Moulding is a vulnerable moment - a moulting cicada getting eaten alive by big-headed ants. And (3) aduldhood also dangerous! A cicada in the mouth of a broad-billed motmot. Over the past few days in Panama.

Central Park is full of active Robin's nests at the moment. This one is at eye-level on the North side of the Pool @birdcpk.bsky.social

An American oystercatcher feeding its chick today at Rockaway beach, NY.

No kiss required to turn this pickerel frog into a prince. Catskills, NY.

What a snake!

One of two wrentits rehydrating at a dripping pipe in Mission Trails, California. These are endemic to west coast scrubland, from Oregon south to Baja California, and are the only New World representative of the Parrotbills. They form lifelong pair bonds.

Pink-footed geese wintering in Norfolk, where they form flocks of thousands and feed on post-harvest sugar beet tops.