Nathan Senner

7/Ultimately, large, age-structured populations may be robust to rare mass-mortality events. But, if those events start to happen more frequently, recovery may become impossible. What's more, climate change is also selecting for earlier breeding, putting martins between a rock and a hard place.

6/Nonetheless, our demographic analyses suggest that because of the reduction in reproductive success and the number of adults killed by the storm, martin populations will take at least 6-7 years to recover. That's if another storm doesn't come along first. If that happens, recovery could decades...

Timeline - Purple Martin Conservation Association Purple Martin birds rely on human-provided housing. Learn more about Purple Martin Biology, Behavior, Lifecycle, Timeline, and more.

5/We were surprised that, in 2023, martin migratory timing started to return to 'normal' and, in 2024, they arrived earlier than the long-term mean. This was probably because the storm didn't kill any sub-adult martins & they advance their migrations as they age. www.purplemartin.org/timeline/

4/Following the storm, martins delayed breeding by 12 days and their reproductive success was the lowest in 27 years of citizen science monitoring. In 2022, they also returned to TX and LA 2 wks late. Using these data, we estimated that the storm killed 5-24% of adult martins across the two states.

3/By examining the specimens, we determined that the martins likely died of cold exposure and not starvation. We also compared their genomes with those of martins sampled from TX both before and after the storm. Remarkably we saw signatures across the genome of differences among these three groups.

2/Our project started with citizen scientists from @pmca.bsky.social reporting 100s of dead Purple Martins across TX and LA in the wake of the storms. The @lsu.bsky.social Museum of Natural Science was able to collect those storm victims and bring them to the museum where we could measure them.

1/ Remember when Ted Cruz went to Cancún as the Texas power grid failed? It wasn't just the people of TX left behind, it was also the wildlife. Out now @natecoevo.nature.com, our paper led by @mstager.bsky.social & @treeswallows.bsky.social documents how bad the storms were for birds.

rdcu.be/e7aUy

Sunset sky with hundreds of birds flying around.

purple martin bird

purple martin feeding baby purple martin

One flying purple martin

A new UMass study in @natecoevo.nature.com has found how many purple martins died in The Great Texas Freeze of 2021—and how long recovery may take.

https://bit.ly/40JO1eK

Our paper is out in @Science! The Atlantic silverside spans Earth's steepest latitudinal gradient in coastal sea-surface temperature. Despite high gene flow, populations show clinal genetic variation in multiple locally adapted traits. doi.org/10.1126/scie...

Marsupials previously thought extinct for millennia discovered in New Guinea The chances of finding one mammal species thought to be lost was ‘almost zero’ and finding two is ‘unprecedented’, biologist Tim Flannery says

😲

www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Schematic illustration of variation in selection predominantly determined by (a) spatial effects, (b) temporal effects or (c) spatio-temporal effects

Annual variation in natural selection on two reproductive traits (egg laying date and clutch size) between 1980-2024 in blue and great tits in 8 sub-populations of Wytham Woods, Oxfordshire

Scatter plots - with associated correlation coefficients - for annual estimates of natural selection on reproductive traits in blue and great tits. Relationships are moderately to strongly correlated across years, suggesting that there are common drivers of variation in selection in both species

What most determines variation in the strength of natural selection? Spatial variation, temporal vn or space*time together? New research by @jorgensoraker.bsky.social et al. exploring this Q using 45y of Wytham tit data. Strong time & space*time signal + cross-species corr'n

doi.org/10.64898/202...

New Paper alert 📄

Rüppel et al. 2026 - "movetrack: An R package to model flight paths from radio-telemetry networks"
-> this makes it possible to transform station-based radiotelemetry data into actual flight path, validated with a plane flight.

besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Big effort, exciting results - our paper on the constraints of thermal limits in tropical insects is now out in @nature.com! 🦋🐝🪰🪲🦗
@ecoresearchzoo3.bsky.social
@biologie-uniwue.bsky.social
@uni-wuerzburg.de

#NewPaperAlert! So incredibly proud of Katy Silber, former PhD student & post-doc for publishing ALL of the work she did in the lab. This last paper @pnas.org answers the question, how and why does rain matter to bird reproduction, *generally*? Here is the graphic summary... details below.
1/n

A selfie in front of the conference welcome sign. The logo shows a sea turtle at the water’s surface with a volcano in the background. Across the volcano is the word “Kaiāulu”, which is a Hawaiian word for community/neighborhood/village. The theme reflects the close-knit nature of the people who work with sea turtles - celebrating how we support one another to coordinate conservation, science, and management around the world. The pronunciation of Kaiāulu in English is roughly "kai-ah-oo-loo": Kai sounds like "kite" without the "t", ā is a long "ah" sound, ulu is like "oo-loo". So, the full pronunciation is "kai-AH-oo-loo" with emphasis on the "AH" syllable.

I’ll be posting this week from the International Sea Turtle Society symposium in Hawai’i

Day 1 was full of fantastic workshops: in the morning I attended one about applying for research permits to study turtles, and my afternoon was all about sea turtle epibionts 🌊🐢

#ISTS44 #ISTS2026 #seaturtle

Lead author Wes Walsh, his tattoo of Agelenopsis pennsylvanica (the Pennsylvanian grass spider) and one of the inspirations for this study, a live Platycryptus undatus (tan jumping spider). Credit: Wes Walsh

🕸️ Scared of spiders? The real horror could be a world without them. New UMass Amherst research shows spiders & other arachnids are vital for healthy ecosystems, yet most have no conservation status.
https://www.umass.edu/news/article/scared-spiders-real-horror-story-world-without-them

IOB, Now in issue!

State-Dependent and Social Modulation of Circulating #Glucocorticoids in a Nomadic #Songbird, the Red #Crossbill (Loxia Curvirostra)

(cover photo) Neil Paprocki
Vernasco et al

doi.org/10.1093/iob/...

#birds #biology #hormones #ecology #endocrine

Theunis Piersma roept op: "Geef wetenschappers de tijd voor goed onderzoek" Geef onderzoekers de ruimte om de natuur voor een langere periode te onderzoeken. Die oproep deed de Friese trekvogelprofessor Theunis Piersma op Texel.

www.omropfryslan.nl/nl/nieuws/18...

@niozsearesearch.bsky.social @han-dolman.bsky.social @waddenacademie.bsky.social @jorienbakker.bsky.social @fryskeakademy.bsky.social @rug.nl @thomasoudman.bsky.social @allertbijleveld.bsky.social @marionkoopmans.bsky.social @dewaddenvereniging.bsky.social

Latest Wadertales blog on why timing of breeding advances more in short-distance migrants: wadertales.wordpress.com/2026/02/28/m..., from neat new @ecol-evol.bsky.social paper led by Verónica Méndez using 16 years of data on Icelandic waders: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....
#ornithology

White House stalls release of approved US science budgets The US Congress rejected sweeping cuts to science agencies. But the NIH, the NSF and NASA have had their spending slowed.

Congress rejected massive cuts to US science budgets for 2026, but much of the money still isn’t flowing to researchers.

The culprit? The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is quietly slow-walking the release of funds. 🧵👇

NSF officials break silence on how AI and quantum now drive agency grantmaking Leaders acknowledge White House role in controversial moves

NSF leaders have just acknowledged what many scientists have long suspected: Presidential directives to boost AI and quantum have upended its traditional way of doing business. www.science.org/content/arti...

Graphic with two parts, a map and a chart. Top section: A map showing intact tropical forests in northern South America, most of them in the Amazon River basin. Three locations are called out: 1 is in Panama; 2 is on the eastern border of Ecuador, near the borders with Colombia and Peru; and 3 is in Brazil, on the Amazon River. Undisturbed tropical forest areas are defined as areas where no disturbances were detected in a comparison of satellite imagery from 1990 to 2024. Bottom section: Dot plot with confidence intervals. For each of the three map locations, the chart shows the average annual change in mist net captures for insectivores and for the total bird community. For all three locations, the average annual change for insectivores is in the negative and is lower than for the total bird community.

Intact tropical forests are seeing mysterious bird declines. Is another “silent spring” brewing?

Learn more: https://scim.ag/4aCs0Er

Acceleration hotspots of North American birds’ decline are associated with agriculture Human activities might have accelerated declines of population abundance, but this acceleration remains underexplored. Using 1033 North American Breeding Bird Survey routes, we analyze abundance chang...

Thrilled to share our new paper out in @science.org, led by François Leroy and Petr Keil! Using the Breeding Bird Survey, we document not only a continent-wide decline in bird abundance since the 1980s — but, crucially, the acceleration of these declines over time. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Climatic variability drives greater thermal tolerance breadth and enables larger range size in butterflies Abstract. Although climatic variability has been proposed to shape physiological tolerances, and in turn, species distributions, relatively few studies hav

We found support for the Rapoport effect in butterflies 🦋 species that live in more variable climates have broader thermal tolerances and larger range sizes. A collaboration with Aaron Yilmaz and @sarahdiamond.bsky.social 🔬

academic.oup.com/biolinnean/a...

Fig. 1 from the article: Illustration of the two main wing muscles – pectoralis and supracoracoideus – of a migratory passerine.

Fig. 4 from the article: Representation of the diverse ways in which myokines can influence the function of different organs throughout the body.

Fig. 5 from the article: (A) Conceptualization of a behavioral control system, as outlined by Fuxjager et al. (2023). Behavioral control systems are shown through the lens of spring (B) and autumn (C) migrations, with skeletal muscle (dark red) playing a role in the regulation of physiological systems that all promote one singular behavioral node (migration, dark orange) at the expense of others (dimmed behavioral nodes).

New paper: a review of how skeletal muscles support long-distance bird migration, highlighting their plasticity, coordination via endocrine signals, and interactions with other organ systems.

➡️ vist.ly/4sdqf

#ornithology #birds #migration #physiology #signals #adaptation #evolution

Exposure of western United States bird communities to predicted high severity fire - Nature Communications Changing fire regimes, leading to higher likelihood of high severity fire, are having unknown impacts on biodiversity. This study identifies regions of high avian biodiversity and individual bird spec...

Where will novel fire regimes threaten birds? Our paper in @natcomms.nature.com shows that most bird diversity hotspots facing future high-sev fire occur in places that historically burned at low severity - a critical mismatch. These are the spots to focus restoration.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Selection-driven color variation in the aposematic strawberry poison frog, Oophaga pumilio Aguilar-Gómez et al. use exome sequencing of 347 strawberry poison frogs to uncover the genetic basis of color variation. They identify that kit, ttc39b, and bco1 underlie blue-red, yellow-red, and gr...

The last chapter of my PhD is finally out !!!! In the same species, on neighboring islands, we see radically different warning colors emerge. Evolution in action:
Selection-driven color variation in the aposematic strawberry poison frog, Oophaga pumilio: Current Biology www.cell.com/current-biol...

Happy to share our new paper—led by Ethan Abercrombie in collaboration with Adam Smith @earthskysea.bsky.social and Lyle Usdin @washu.edu—exploring responses of small-mammal communities to a century of climate change in the Sierra Nevada mountains 🏔️ 🐿️

doi.org/10.1002/ecog...

Global Trends in Drought Impacts on Wildlife—A Review We reviewed peer reviewed literature pertaining to instances of anomalous drought (any drought event that deviates from standard conditions (e.g., dry season) when compared to a long term average) an...

New paper from our lab, led by Leah McTigue
We reviewed 40+ years of research on drought affects on wildlife: 66% of single-species responses were negative, only 2% positive.
As droughts intensify under climate change, wildlife are in trouble. 🌍🌐🧪
📄 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Unraveling abundance from occurrence: Modeling an endangered rodent population with low capture probability Predicting population abundance while accounting for uncertainty is an essential task for managers of endangered species but is often hindered by the challenge and expense of comprehensive data colle...

Unraveling abundance from occurrence: Modeling an endangered rodent population with low capture probability esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...