Michaël Nicolaï's Avatar

Michaël Nicolaï

@michaelnicolai

Proud dad of three. Post-doc at the EON lab (UGent). Lover of color. Nothing makes sense in evolution except the biology of (f)light.

546
Followers
230
Following
74
Posts
29.09.2023
Joined
Posts Following

Latest posts by Michaël Nicolaï @michaelnicolai

In Dutch king of winter ;)

06.03.2026 15:51 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Post image

🦎 Funded 4-year PhD position on Lizard Evolutionary Ecology in our lab at UCLouvain (Belgium)! Apply before 9 March! jobs.uclouvain.be/Personnelsci...

03.02.2026 13:50 👍 28 🔁 46 💬 0 📌 2
Post image

New paper out! 🐦📊

We realease AVONICHE, a global dataset with detailed information on the proportional use of 32 foraging niches, combining dietary categories with the behaviours and substrates used to access resources.

Openly access the paper and data in GEB: doi.org/10.1111/geb....

08.01.2026 11:09 👍 94 🔁 46 💬 6 📌 7

Thrilled to share our new review online with
@scottvedwards.bsky.social in @Trends Ecol & Evo! “pangenomics is rapidly transforming our ability to dissect the genetic basis of ecological and evolutionary change in natural systems.”

26.12.2025 16:20 👍 13 🔁 6 💬 0 📌 0
Preview
Pangenomes: new tools for ecological and evolutionary genomics Genomic structural variation is an important component of genetic variation in natural populations. By assembling and analyzing multiple high-quality genomes within a species or clade, pangenomes capt...

www.cell.com/trends/ecolo...

26.12.2025 15:01 👍 60 🔁 20 💬 0 📌 1

Currently recruiting PhD students to follow up on this result - please come to have a chat if interested #ASABWinter2025

15.12.2025 12:39 👍 16 🔁 15 💬 0 📌 0

Ask it? 😅

01.12.2025 18:15 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Post image Post image

🚨Two funded PhDs on the evolutionary ecology of antipredator colouration 🦋 with myself and Iliana Medina.

One in Swansea tinyurl.com/4thtbph6 deadline Jan 12th @crocus-dla.bsky.social

The other in Melbourne - deadline Jan 1st

Please share among potential students!

01.12.2025 14:39 👍 38 🔁 48 💬 0 📌 0
Post image Post image Post image Post image

Our new paper is out today in Journal of the Royal Society Interface (link below). All about eggshell roughness: "Scratching beyond the surface: examining macroecological patterns in avian eggshell texture". Congrats first author Marie Attard, and thank you @leverhulme.ac.uk for the funding.

26.11.2025 07:25 👍 46 🔁 15 💬 2 📌 0

Very much interested! I use birds to esimate/reconstruct colours of dinosaur feathers.

25.11.2025 13:49 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Preview
QUARTILES DLA CASE: Trait-based drivers of the ornamental plant trade at University of Aberdeen on FindAPhD.com PhD Project - QUARTILES DLA CASE: Trait-based drivers of the ornamental plant trade at University of Aberdeen , listed on FindAPhD.com

Like big trait databases? Think biology should think about humans more? Fascinated by house plants?

My fantastic colleagues and I are advertising a PhD project based at the University of Aberdeen on the ornamental plant trade. Come join us!

www.findaphd.com/phds/project...

20.11.2025 17:17 👍 5 🔁 3 💬 1 📌 0

Back from #BOUasm25. I can’t praise the organisation enough? An amazing line-up of speakers! I’ve come back feeling inspired! I can now also check "seeing Cook and Darwin specimens" from my bucket list thanks to the amazing team at Tring.

20.11.2025 09:36 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Research Fellow in Behaviour and Ecology Role type: Full Time; Fixed Term for 2 years Faculty: Faculty of Science Department/ School: School of Biosciences Salary: Level A: $87,266 - $118,416 (PhD Entry Level - $110,319) plus 17% super Colla...

Anyone looking for a Australia-based postdoc? Like animal behaviour / coding / birds? My fantastic collaborator, Iliana Medina, is advertising a position researching bird nests:

unimelb.wd105.myworkdayjobs.com/en-GB/UoM_Ex...

19.11.2025 13:13 👍 42 🔁 36 💬 0 📌 1

One of the amazing/inspiring talks being yours!

18.11.2025 20:06 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
Post image

We’re kicking off session 1 with a keynote from Alex Bond, “From specimens to solutions: the evolving role and current challenges of natural history collections” 💭

Andreanna Welch joins us as Chair for this session.

@thelabandfield.bsky.social  #BOUasm25 #ornithology #naturalhistory

18.11.2025 10:19 👍 21 🔁 2 💬 0 📌 1

Congratulations! That´s awesome!

06.11.2025 19:51 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Examples of some recent papers from graduate students in my group - a full list of recent papers and preprints can be found here (https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?hl=en&user=pTdxVdIAAAAJ) and profile of the group here: https://egioxford.web.ox.ac.uk/members

Examples of some recent papers from graduate students in my group - a full list of recent papers and preprints can be found here (https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?hl=en&user=pTdxVdIAAAAJ) and profile of the group here: https://egioxford.web.ox.ac.uk/members

The annual Wytham Field Team Photo!

The annual Wytham Field Team Photo!

Celebrating a successful field season with great food & good company - May 2025

Celebrating a successful field season with great food & good company - May 2025

Front view of the Life & Mind Building, which opened in Oct 2025: The new home of Biology at Oxford

Front view of the Life & Mind Building, which opened in Oct 2025: The new home of Biology at Oxford

Interested in a PhD in ornithology? Funding available for projects at the interface of ecology, behaviour & evolution from Oct '26 working on long-term population studies of tits at Wytham, based in @biology.ox.ac.uk in the new Life & Mind Building in Oxford
www.findaphd.com/phds/project...

20.10.2025 19:43 👍 101 🔁 151 💬 5 📌 2
Preview
Loss of macroevolutionary species fitness explains the rise and fall of clades - Nature Ecology & Evolution The interplay between speciation and extinction rates shapes clade diversity dynamics. Using a novel phylogenetic model that includes living and fossil lineages, the authors estimate speciation and ex...

Excited to share our new paper where we find that the rise, decline and fall of clades is not explained by the usual suspects (diversity-dependence, ecological opportunities) but rather by species' insidious loss of macroevolutionary fitness: www.nature.com/articles/s41... 1/3

17.10.2025 09:12 👍 97 🔁 46 💬 2 📌 2
Preview
A long-necked early dinosaur from a newly discovered Upper Triassic basin in the Andes - Nature Discovery of a nearly complete skeleton of Huayracursor jaguensis, a Carnian dinosaur from the Northern Precordillera Basin in northwestern Argentina provides evidence of increased body size and early...

Hechenleitner, E.M., Martinelli, A.G., Rocher, S. et al. A long-necked early dinosaur from a newly discovered Upper Triassic basin in the Andes. Nature (2025). doi.org/10.1038/s415...

15.10.2025 16:39 👍 72 🔁 16 💬 1 📌 0

Hopefully it will stay a bit longer like last year and you can see it in it's full glory!

08.10.2025 11:03 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

The answer is ´no´. As a rooteater: is it worth the effort?

04.10.2025 19:38 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Any idea about the densities of this phenomenon (in km² or km³)?

02.10.2025 11:43 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

Is looking for iridescent plumage, but then finding an iridescent bill one? Or dark skin in one specimen resulting in finding that it's actually wide spread?

30.09.2025 11:29 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

I'm not comparing myself to Darwin "But I am very poorly today & very stupid & hate everybody & everything."

29.09.2025 14:14 👍 9 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0
A white-fronted bee-eater (Merops bullockoides) decides whether to consume a warningly colored white-barred acraea butterfly (Telchinia encedon). Photo (c) Mike Rowe

A white-fronted bee-eater (Merops bullockoides) decides whether to consume a warningly colored white-barred acraea butterfly (Telchinia encedon). Photo (c) Mike Rowe

📢🦋 Our paper ‘Global selection on insect antipredator coloration’ is out and featured on the cover of @science.org

We ran a huge experiment to find out how ecological context favours camouflage and warning colouration as antipredator strategies. 1/6

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

25.09.2025 18:25 👍 132 🔁 53 💬 3 📌 6

Every year again, this blows my mind. At the same a gentle reminder that one upon a time there were over a BILLION passenger pigeons alone. What we are seeing now is probably just a fraction of what we had before 😱

25.09.2025 08:34 👍 3 🔁 2 💬 0 📌 0
Post image Post image

In 2017, we discovered the whereabouts of the last known male #greatauk 👉 tinyurl.com/3nc8s74x

Now we’ve confirmed where the last female resides…
Spoiler: she’s at @cincymuseum.bsky.social!

Read the full story here 👉 academic.oup.com/zoolinnean/a...

22.09.2025 20:23 👍 17 🔁 7 💬 1 📌 1
Wood tiger moth on leaf. Photo: Juhani Maamela.

Wood tiger moth on leaf. Photo: Juhani Maamela.

Funded PhD position available 🎉 Come and work with me in Helsinki to uncover the pathways producing colourful tiger moth wings. Lots of options for genomics, CRISPR, fieldwork, behaviour experiments… Email with questions! jobs.helsinki.fi/job/Helsinki...

24.09.2025 08:53 👍 67 🔁 50 💬 3 📌 4
Rainbow-like colours in the fur of a tropical rat (Otomys tropicalis)

Rainbow-like colours in the fur of a tropical rat (Otomys tropicalis)

Super happy to share the first chapter of my PhD, published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface ✨🐀 royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...
Iridescence in mammals is not as rare as we thought, but it’s all created in the same way!

17.09.2025 17:05 👍 33 🔁 20 💬 2 📌 0
Post image

Hey you. Wanna apply for a fellowship on collections? the AHRC Early career fellowships in cultural & heritage institutions are open!

The Natural History Museum priorities are below.

If you wanna talk birds, hit me up. Collectors, colonialism, Canada, Australia & more

www.ukri.org/opportunity/...

12.09.2025 19:01 👍 26 🔁 44 💬 1 📌 2