Mats Ittonen

Apart from this peculiar ceiling, I also happened to see a real kingfisher. Maybe I should start a list for my conference bird sightings... #TIBS2026

However great #TIBS2026 has been, I can't endure three full days of talks. So I took a few hours off to visit Den gamle byn, and what an impressive museum (or collection of museums) it turned out to be! Go there if you can find the time while in Aarhus!

The park next to the #TIBS2026 venue offers unexpected birding fun – I'm not used to aggregations of 15 or so moorhens casually hanging around with gulls, mallards and jackdaws.

Bye bye, Sweden!

I spent a wonderful family holiday in our beautifully snowy former hometown, Uppsala! Now it's time for work again, but not quite the usual kind of work – #TIBS2026 and Aarhus, here I come!

...which I think says something essential about being a biologist! (2/2)

I finally finished reading Walden! In many places a frustrating, but also an interesting, occasionally funny, and often beautiful read. A few favourites of mine: the excited ant war report, the excessively detailed description of different kinds of ice, and this pictured passage... (1/2)

Front cover of the European Butterfly Red List, showing Polyommatus humedasae. The report can be downloaded at https://www.bc-europe.eu/webpage.php?name=red-list-butterflies-2025

The new European Butterfly Red List is published today, with worrying findings. Over 1/4 (28%) of Europe’s 442 species are threatened with extinction or are close to being so. The situation is far worse for our 148 endemic species, 40% are now threatened or nearly so www.bc-europe.eu/webpage.php?...

Web Ecology (The European ecological federation's diamond open access journal) seems like the obvious choice.

Ei ole niin pientä veronkorotusta, etteikö kaivosala sitä vastaan pullikoisi – kaivosveroa on välttämätöntä korottaa Kaivostoimijat ovat joukolla nousseet vastustamaan hallituksen esittämää maltillista kaivosveron korotusta valtakunnallisella mediakampanjalla. Vuonna 2024 Suomessa otettiin vuosien vaikuttamistyön…

Kaivosala on käynnistänyt mediakampanjan, jonka tavoitteena on saada hallitus perumaan maltillisen kaivosveron maltillinen korotus. Luonnonsuojeluliitto antaa hallitukselle ruusuja & kehottaa kaivosteollisuutta keskittymään toimintansa kestävyyden parantamiseen. #kaivokset
www.sll.fi/ajankohtaist...

Lukijan mielipide | Hallitus esitys kaivosverosta ansaitsee kiitoksen Ilman riittävää kaivosverotusta uhkana on, että myös hyvin matalapitoiset ja heikot mineraaliesiintymät avataan.

Ympäristöpäällikkömme @heiantti.bsky.social kirjoittaa, että kaivosveron korotus on välttämätöntä ja oikein. Se ohjaa kaivosyhtiöitä muuttamaan toimintaansa kestävämmäksi ja jättämään matalapitoisimmat esiintymät rauhaan. Suomen #kaivosvero on korotuksenkin jälkeen matala.

www.hs.fi/mielipide/ar...

Kommentti | Poliisien olisi ehkä kannattanut jättää vitsit sikseen ja ottaa tieto norosta vakavasti Käräjäoikeuden päätös saa miettimään, olisiko poliisin kannattanut valvoa vesilain noudattamista eikä varmistaa hakkuiden toteutumista, kirjoittaa HS:n ympäristötoimittaja Heli Saavalainen.

Finland's main newspaper asks whether the police shouldn't originally have stopped the illegal logging (by the city of Helsinki), instead of carrying the activists away! www.hs.fi/alueet/art-2...

Helsingin Stansvikin metsän suojelijoille ei niskoittelutuomioita – käräjäoikeus pohti päätöksenteossa Koijärvi-liikettä Viittä mielenosoittajaa syytettiin niskoittelusta poliisia vastaan Stansvikin metsässä kaksi vuotta sitten.

Remarkable & important Finnish court decision. Activists stopped logging in Helsinki & didn't follow police's orders to leave. The court ruled activists had the right to break the law (disobedience towards police) because they had to; it was the only way to save a legally protected stream habitat!

Bookmarking for later.

German minister of culture criticized countries that boycott the Eurovision Song Contest if Israel participates for "cancel culture". The willingness of leading German politicians to approve genocide is quite baffling. I mean, they were supposed to have learned something from their country's past...

I don't know what to really think of this, but it was an interesting late-night read for sure!

News from Finland. A 9-year-old lost an especially good stick he’d had since he was 2. He hung up 20 posters. A few days later it was returned. It had been found by a 2-year-old, who wanted to keep it for herself, but her mother made her return it. She got toys, flowers and candy as a reward.

🚨🚨🚨
In the worst tradition of the McCarthy-era anti-communist House Un-American Activities Committee, the GOP House Oversight Committee has just launch a massive, grotesque, ad hominem, partisan assault on the US National Academy of Sciences.

oversight.house.gov/wp-content/u...

It took me some thinking to even understand the somewhat subtle difference in meaning between "none is" and "none are"... And then I realised that my native languages (Finnish & Swedish) both use different word forms (in place of "none") for the two meanings; very practical! 😊

‘None Is’ or ‘None Are’? When you’re thinking about singulars and plurals, you often consider whether you have one or many of something, but the word “none” is tricky because it’s nothing—it’s not one or many of something. Th...

I would've written "are", and "is" sounds weird. So I had to google what @grammargirl.bsky.social has to say: www.quickanddirtytips.com/articles/non.... Turns out Word (and my instinct) weren't that wrong!

Pölytysmielessä siitä voisi olla hyötyä, jos vaikka haluaa houkutella kotipuutarhaansa perhosia ja muita hyönteisiä, jotka sitten samalla voivat tulla käyneeksi kukillakin.

Enpä osaa kuvitella mitään oikeaa haittaa, ellette sitten tehtaile niitä sadoittain samalle alueelle. :) Teoriassa se on pois nälästä ja siten pölytyksestä, mutta käytännön merkitys lienee olematon. Ja kyllä ne perhoset käsittääkseni pärjäävät millä tahansa sokerilitkulla, mitä onnistuvat löytämään.

Data citation:
GBIF.org (26 August 2025) GBIF Occurrence Download doi.org/10.15468/dl..... (3/3)

Germany is probably hiding millions of observations in paper archives. ;) It's also interesting to see how Lithuania and Estonia are much better covered than Latvia. I wonder if this has something to do with different traditions in ecological research. (2/3)

Map of areas meeting thresholds for butterfly observation count & species sampling coverage in 2001–2010. I find this fascinating. I expected the good coverage in western and parts of northern Europe, but, knowing little about south-eastern Europe, I didn't expect Serbia to be a data hotspot. (1/3)

Note to @eseb.bsky.social: I can't change her birthday (anymore), but you could organize the conference a week later. 😉

Enviously peeking in on all the #ESEB2025 content posted here. I've always wanted to go, but never did because ESEB always overlaps with my daughter's birthday! 🙁Well, I currently don't do much evolution anyway, but this year I was at least lucky to have Matthew Nielsen present our recent paper!

Butterfly abundance changes in England are well associated with extreme climate events Climate change exerts significant impacts on ecosystems through extreme climate events (ECEs), which are linked to various climate variables and can o…

Interesting paper using @ukbms.bsky.social data to examine extreme weather impacts on butterfly populations. Winter heatwaves and periods of high rainfall appear bad for many species. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... 🌍

Barely an hour ago, Palestinian journalist Anas Al-Sharif warned us all:

“If this madness doesn’t end, Gaza will be reduced to ruins, its people’s voices silenced, their faces erased — and history will remember you as silent witnesses to a genocide you chose not to stop.”

Israel just killed him.

Oli!