NIH sent notice this week that it will no longer recognize a union of early career researchers on the basis that trainees aren't "employees." My latest for @science.org.
www.science.org/content/arti...
Koalas (Phascolarctos cinereus), such as this mother and 7-month-old joey from Queensland, Australia, embody a genetic paradox. Populations rich in diversity are declining, whereas those with little variation are expanding and rapidly reshuffling their genomes. These findings reveal that diversity alone does not determine resilience. Instead, a population’s fate depends on several evolutionary processes unfolding across generations.
According to a new study of Australia’s koala populations, rapid demographic rebound may be able to restore once-lost genetic variation and drive recombination in ways that re-establish long-term evolutionary potential in previously bottlenecked populations.
Learn more: https://scim.ag/4b6hLaE
Been wanting to write this one for awhile!
Conservation obsesses over rare species. But what about the common ones?
Bluegill are the fish almost everyone knows & caught as a child. But, how much do we REALLY know?
New long-form essay 👇 🎣 #InDefeseOfPanfish tnature.substack.com/p/behold-the...
A war that isn't a war, documented with videos that may or may not be real, funded by elected leaders who are neither for nor against it, is the most dystopian thing that's happened in my lifetime
You're absolutely right—that was not a command post, that was an elementary school. Those were not military leaders—they were schoolchildren. I said the opposite, and that's on me.
An ancient aspen tree is growing moss at the stem.
Fallen trees are covered with moss on the forest floor.
Old-growth boreal forests have so much more life in them compared to monoculture plantations. Ancient trees decay for ages on the forest floor, providing habitat for plants and animals. Vitality everywhere you look.
It's the funding of taxonomic research & training that's dying out. Without an ability to identify life forms, we can't recognize/quantify invasions & extinctions and their impacts on ecosystems. Imagine trying to repair a complex steel structure if you can't distinguish different types of bearings.
Three weeks ago I spent a few days in one of our global dark sky sanctuaries in Rakiura Stewart Island New Zealand. Never has deep time felt so real or so close.
But every now and then one of Elon's dumbfuck satellites would interrupt the eternal rhythms of the stars. Let's not let it get worse.
This is a mental war that we have to win. It's not about being a luddite, it's about destroying or retaining the ability to think. It's about how insidious this becomes in a situation where generative AI is adopted and then subverted intentionally.
www.thealgorithmicbridge.com/p/a-new-whar...
This was such a fun collaboration with @analog-ashley.bsky.social and team, including some of our own @sciencebanshee.bsky.social and @shen4brains.bsky.social And h/t to Alana McPherson for the infographic!
dx.plos.org/10.1371/jour...
Sketch book page showing pencil drawings of a male Xiphophorus birchmannj and male Poecilia salvatoris.
Couple poeciliid sketches for #SundayFishSketch
Xiphophorus birchmanni and Poecilia salvatoris
#poeciliidae #SciArt
How specific are heritable symbioses?
And what can we learn from swapping obligate symbionts across host species?
We address this in our latest, led by @inespons.bsky.social & in our collaboration w/ @microbiome.bsky.social 🦠🪲 Out today in @natcomms.nature.com!
1/n
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
New in JFB: Alfaro huberi must have one of the strangest mating behaviors among poeciliid fishes. #TeamFish #FishSci
Paper: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
Corresponding video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKWA...
Are you an relatively new to field ecology and data collection? Or are are you supervising students? Our guide for effective field data collection is now published in @methodsinecoevol.bsky.social! We also include a printable poster with a visual overview of the guide
doi.org/10.1111/2041...
This is hands-down the best thing I’ve read on Epstein‘s worldview and those of his fellow tech, finance, and academic elite. It’s a rough read, but at least every paragraph is a banger. 🔥🔥🔥😭
I'm super excited to share that this article was published today in Science! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
All made possible by the fantastic group of donors, volunteers and scientists at The American Chestnut Foundation (tacf.org), HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology, and our collaborators.
Pen and watercolour illustrations of waders/shorebirds from the Hartlepool/Teesmouth area of northeast England
A not-completely-exhaustive illustration of our winter shorebirds, but these are the species that you’re most likely to see during winter around Teesmouth (northeast England).
🐡🪶
#birdingNortheast
Auf dem Bild ist ein Biber zu sehen. Der Text: Jetzt Petition unterzeichnen: Schützt die Biber!
🦫 Die neue Biberverordnung in Baden-Württemberg sieht vor, dass Biber leichter getötet werden können. Aber der #Biber ist nicht das Problem, sondern die Lösung: Er ist eine Schlüsselart für unsere Natur! Hilf uns, Biber in BaWü zu schützen.
✏️ Zur Petition ➡️ petitionen.landtag-bw.de/Petitionen/D...
Using behavior experiments, environmental data, and genomic analyses on a global collection of wild C. elegans isolates, we show that variation in aggregation behavior is likely driven by natural selection in response to elevational gradients.
Multi panel figure from a scientific manuscript. Panel A shows a map of the globe with sampling sites for different isolates of C. elegans indicated. Panel B shows two plots demonstrating variation in different aspects of a collective aggregation behavior among globally collected strains. Two strains which greatly differ in the magnitude of aggregation are highlighted below the graphs, with circular plots showing the representative distribution of worms during experiments. The less aggregating strain has individuals dispersed across the field of view, the more aggregating has clumps of individuals gathered together.
New preprint from the Genes and Behavior group! @mpi-animalbehav.bsky.social @cbehav.bsky.social
Youn Jae Kang led this study on the evolution of a collective behavior in C. elegans. doi.org/qq3t
📸 We’re delighted to unveil the winners of the RES #InsectWeek Photography Competition 2025!
🏆 Overall Winner Raghuram Annadana (IG: macro_by_raghu). The image shows a parasitic wasp laying its eggs inside Banana Skipper butterfly eggs.
Read more and view the galleries 🔽
A 2 panel sketch disgram of a 1 meter tall pod. in the second panel, an oval section pops off and a demonic little face with short tentacles flies out, crudely drawn.
My favorite artifact in the "you don't need AI to do art" discourse is, of course, screenwriter Dan O'Bannon's sketch of the facehugger to explain it to Giger.
We hear woodpecker drumming everywhere, but rarely ask what it truly signals. This Conceptual Note looks at what we know — and what we don’t.
theornithologist.org/is-woodpecke...
#birds #birding #Woodpeckers #TheOrnithologist #ornithology
New Biology Letters paper! 🐟🐟🐟
Long-term lab rearing did not erode key physiological tolerances in an extremophile fish; encouraging for ex-situ conservation! #FishSci
royalsocietypublishing.org/rsbl/article...
While reporting this, I had something happen that's never happened. A comms rep for one of the co's disputed my reporting and said what I was telling them was untrue because it was not in Grok, xAI's chatbot.
I was looking directly at the files. And this person was using AI to challenge the truth.
A hermit thrush, a passerine with brown head, back, and wings and a white breast with brown speckles; photo by Mick Thompson, via Flickr
From 1981 to 2016, hermit thrushes migrating through Chicago became smaller, with shorter bills and longer wings, relative to body size— there are genetic changes associated with shortening bills, but not the other changes 🌿 🪶
buff.ly/gzX4Oz0
