🍂 Good Afternoon, and welcome to another edition of the ASAB Newsletter! 🍂

We’ve got updates from the exciting summer conference in Kolkata, call for nominations for the Christopher Barnard award & ASAB Medal 2026, news from the ASAB Grants & Education Committees and the Animal Behaviour Journal. And if that wasn’t enough there’s also a ‘Meet ASAB’ piece on our former Meetings Secretary: Joah Madden. You can also find infomation on our upcoming confrences!!

As always, if you have any questions about ASAB's activities please get in touch at webeditor@asab.org. You can also keep up to date with announcements on animal behaviour opportunities in between our newsletters by joining our Animal Behaviour JISCMail!

If you want to contact specific members of the ASAB council, you can find their contact details here - we are always happy to answer your questions!

Happy reading!

Sophia Daoudi-Simison

ASAB Communications Officer

Our inaugural “Meet ASAB” features someone you've all seen if you've been to a meeting in the last 7 years: Joah Madden. Our former meetings secretary just finished a very long term, seeing us through the turbulence of lockdown to the first Behaviour meeting outside Europe. Joah is an associate professor at the University of Exeter and has studied many animals, including bowerbirds, beavers, and pheasants. His focus has largely been on the evolution of cognition, with a gradual shift over his career from pure to applied research, and he now is working in collaboration with various charities, organisations and government agencies focused on nature, conservation, and wildlife.

Over 25 yrs ago, Joah first joined ASAB during his PhD and received an ASAB grant during his postdoc (work which was later published in our flagship journal, Animal Behaviour). In fact, he's known some attendees longer than his wife! In 2018, Joah became meetings secretary, and was unknowingly about to head into one of the greatest challenges ASAB has ever faced.

Only one week before its start, the 2020 Spring meeting was cancelled due to COVID. Figuring out how to switch to virtual meetings was not easy – thankfully ASAB had already been looking into online options and Cassandra Raby took the helm! However, networking was not the same, and luckily, Ellen Williams began the Virtual Networking Scheme, bringing together people with shared interests from different career stages. When restrictions loosened, “hublets” were also created to watch meetings remotely in groups, which continue today. Furthermore, inspired to try other new ways to convey science online, former communications officer Kirsty Graham spearheaded the first Twitter conference, which took place in 2021, and again in 2023, in collaboration with our sister organization in the Americas, ABS. As can be seen, Joah oversaw a lot of new endeavours in order to adapt to many unforseen challenges.

After in person meetings resumed, Joah also worked to have a public lecture added to the winter meeting for school children, which has gone wonderfully. Although Joah humbly attributes his success to all the fantastic volunteers and members who have helped make the meetings a success, under his extra long-term he has clearly done a fantastic job keeping the community together. Fortunately, he has passed on his wisdom to our new meetings secretary, Vivek Nityananda, who has already begun to carry on his great work. From all of us, a huge thank you goes out to Joah for all of his hard work, commitment and dedication!

written by Jennifer Colbourne (Social Media Officer)

Reminder to ASAB Members to vote!

We invite our ASAB membership to elect new ASAB Council Members, for the positions of Secretary of the Grants Committee and one Ordinary Member. You can find information about each of the candidates, along with a link to cast your votes: https://asab.wildapricot.org/ASAB-Council-Nominations  

Please make sure that you are already logged in to the ASAB membership website before casting your vote. Note that each member may only vote once for each available position. Please vote by Midnight (UK time) 15th October 2025.

Results of the election will be announced at the ASAB AGM during our winter meeting and circulated in the ASAB newsletter. 

For any problems with logging into the membership website, or registering your vote, please contact our membership secretary, Professor Anna Wilkinson (asabmembership@lincoln.ac.uk).

Call for nominations Christopher Barnard Award & ASAB medal 2026

ASAB Council is seeking nominations for the:

• the Christopher Barnard Award for outstanding contributions by a new investigator (click here for more details), and

• the ASAB Medal for contributions to the science of animal behaviour (click here for more details).

Council would very much like to receive nominations for these prestigious awards by 1st December 2025. Further information about the awards including eligibility, lists of previous recipients and details of how to nominate can be found on the ASAB website.

Nominations should be sent to the Secretary of the Society, Elisa Frasnelli.

Upcoming Conferences

❄️ ASAB Winter Meeting ❄️

Visit the conference website for information and registration.

When: 15th & 16th December 2025

Where: Edinburgh Royal College of Physicians, Scotland

🌸 ASAB Spring Meeting 🌸

When: TBC

Where: University of Bristol, England

☀️ ASAB/ECBB Summer Meeting ☀️

When: 1st-4th September 2026

Where: Anglia Ruskin University, England

Message from the Meetings Secretary

🚨 We are looking for teams to organize ASAB conferences. We are especially interested in organizers for the ASAB summer meeting in 2027 and the spring and winter conferences in upcoming years. 🚨

The summer meeting is a larger meeting usually held in UK or continental Europe and we especially look forward to hearing from people based in continental Europe for 2027.

The student spring meeting is always a fun one, and combines a one-day postgraduate training workshop with a two-day student conference. The meeting is held in late March/early April.

The winter meeting is held in Edinburgh on the first Thursday and Friday in December, and is relatively easy to organize since there is no conference fee and delegates find their own accommodation in Edinburgh. These are loosely centred around a specific theme. Further details and guidelines are available here.

If you are interested in organizing a meeting contact our meetings secretary at vivek.nityananda@newcastle.ac.uk for an informal chat.

Animal Behaviour Journal News

As of 1st November 2025, we will have a new Managing Editor for the UK Office: I am delighted to welcome Dr John Skelhorn to the team. Angela Turner, who has done a magnificent job in the role for a great many years will become our Senior Managing Editor.

I am also very pleased to announce this year’s winners of the Animal Behaviour paper prizes:

🏆 Student prize: Samyuktha Rajan (Stockholm University, Sweden)

🏆 Early-career prize: Kate Cornelsen (University of New South Wales, Australia)

🏆 Geographic prize: Abhijith A V (Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, India)

Full details can be found at: https://www.asab.org/animal-behaviour-journal-awards

A reminder that ASAB are able to support so many animal behaviour endeavours (e.g., three conferences a year, a wide range of grant options and many educational activities) because of the funding that we receive from the publisher (Elsevier) of our society journal, Animal Behaviour. That funding will only continue to exist if the journal remains a success. There are three main ways that you can help:

• Submit your great work to us. We publish primary research, methods and dataset papers, as well as reviews and commentaries: https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/animal-behaviour/publish/guide-for-authors.

• Accept reviewer invitations from our journal. If you are understandably limited in the time you have, please prioritise reviewing for society journals.

• Become part of the editor team. The journal has both Editors and Consulting Editors. Editors are assigned manuscripts that they select reviewers for and then make decisions on following review. Consulting Editors are asked to provide speedy reviews in two situations: either when there have been long delays on a paper (e.g., reviewers have not responded) or when there is a split decision between initial reviewers. Being a Consulting Editor is often a stepping stone to becoming a full Editor. If you are interested in being part of the editor team for 2026, please contact me (andy.radford@bristol.ac.uk) for more information.

 Thank you!

Andy Radford (Executive Editor)

Grants News

Details of how to apply for ASAB Research Grants, Undergraduate Project Scholarships, Conference Attendance, Childcare and Accessibility Grants, and Interdisciplinary Workshop Grants can be found at https://www.asab.org/grant-overview.

Reminder of application deadlines for the following grants - 1st October, 1st February and 1st June:

• Research Grants

• Undergraduate Project Scholarships

• Interdisciplinary Workshop Grants

• Conference Attendance, Childcare and Accessibility Grants

Grants awarded in the June 2025 application round

Research Grants

We had 12 eligible applications. The committee decided to fund 2 proposals:

Lena Grinsted, University of Portsmouth, "Fatal Attraction: Enhancing Fangs with Pheromones" (£9,999)

Jennifer Morinay, University of Sheffield, "Carry-over effects of sociality on cooperative breeding: Unravelling long-tailed tits social network and its carry-over effects on cooperation using non-invasive AI technology" (£10,000)

The total to be awarded is £19,999.

Undergraduate Project Scholarships

We awarded the funding for the single eligible application:

Amber Aylott, University of Exeter, "Exploring evolutionary divergence in the relationship between sperm count and boldness in Trinidadian guppies (Poecilia reticulata)" (£2,450)

🚨 Changes to Research Grants from the 1st October 2025 deadline

ASAB’s mission is to promote and support the study of animal behaviour. A key component of this is to diversify and expand the animal behaviour research community. ASAB's grants committee has revised the funding criteria for Research Grants to explicitly allow EDI (equality, diversity and inclusion) factors to be taken into account by the committee when scoring proposals. These criteria are now included on the webpage for these grants. If you're planning on submitting a proposal, please use the revised application form now available on this webpage.

📈 Increased grant awards from 1st January 2026

To keep up with inflation, ASAB have decided to increase the total amount you can apply for by 50% for the grants listed below. Note, however, that for all our grants, the requests for funding must be reasonable and justified.

• Research Grants now award up to £15,000 (although grants >£10,000 will require additional justification for the funding above £10,000)

• Interdisciplinary Workshop Grants now award up to £7,500

• Conference attendance grants now award up to £750

• Childcare Grants now award up to £750

• Accessibility Grants now award up to £750

The total award has not been increased for other grants as these have been revised more recently than those above.

This year’s summer conference was held in Kolkata, India, and I’d like to extend my heartfelt thanks to the organising committee and all the volunteers for creating such a fantastic event. The programme offered a rich variety of talks and workshops from students and researchers worldwide, along with thought-provoking plenaries and an engaging panel session centred on the theme of failure—a topic we can all relate to in one way or another. It was inspiring to see participants from different institutions connecting during the breaks, building relationships that I hope will continue to grow across borders. Personally, I know I’ve come away with lifelong friends and invaluable connections from this experience.

One of the workshops hosted by a group of ECRs (Dr Janire Catellano Bueno [Wild Animal Initiative; Newcastle University], Christopher Miller (PhD student) [Newcastle University] and Dr Alexandros Vezyrakis [Max Planck Institute fro Evolutionary Biology]) was on the topic of Amplifying global voices: Removing language barriers in academic conferences.

They are inviting participants to take part in a short survey about language barriers at academic conferences. Whether you have faced challenges or not, your input will help us understand how language affects participation, engagement, and accessibility.

The responses will guide practical recommendations for future events, aiming to make academic conferences more inclusive, multilingual, and accessible across disciplines and formats.

Take the survey and help build a more inclusive global research community. We would love to hear from you! https://forms.gle/u8ESktcJP8Y6NHob8 

If you have any questions about the survey or additional input, please contact Dr Janire Castellano Bueno at janire@wildanimalinitiative.org

Articles Available from the Royal Society

The following issues from Royal Society Publishing  Philosophical Transactions Bare now highly cited and widely read:  

Understanding age and society using natural populations organised and edited by Josh A Firth, Greg Albery, Sandra Bouwhuis, Lauren Brent and Rob Salguero-Gomez and the articles can be accessed directly at  www.bit.ly/PTB1916

Animal culture: conservation in a changing worldcompiled and edited by Philippa Brakes, Lucy Aplin, Emma L Carroll, Alison L Greggor, Andrew Whiten and Ellen C Garland and the articles can be accessed directly at www.bit.ly/PTB1925 

Royal Society Publishing has recently published a special issue of Philosophical Transactions B entitled Division of labour as key driver of social evolution compiled and edited by Michael Taborsky, Jennifer Fewell, Robert Gilles and Barbara Taborsky and the articles can be accessed directly at www.bit.ly/PTB1922 

A print version is also available at the special price of £40.00 per issue from sales@royalsociety.org