A really nice Anotylus rugosus from my dry pitfall traps

Final day of Integrative Biodiversity Discovery at @nhm-london.bsky.social. We are comparing automatic model selection and GTR+G for maximum likelihood tree inference, for resolving phylogenetic relationships in our millipedes #DNA

Practiced building a #bioinformatics pipeline in a Conda environment to process millipede sequencing data: trimmed adapters in Porechop, performed QC with NanoPlot, filtered reads using Nanofilt, assembled genomes with Flye, and assessed completeness with BUSCO @nhm-london.bsky.social #DNA

Met the Element Biosciences AVITI #DNA sequencer at @nhm-london.bsky.social, here showing a poor read from a historic insect sample and a great read from modern snail DNA

So many great invert photos at Wildlife Photographer of the Year @nhm-london.bsky.social

Using the MinION and GridION to sequence our millipede #DNA @nhm-london.bsky.social

The first day in the lab at @nhm-london.bsky.social Integrative Biodiversity Discovery course. We collected millipedes, separated voucher samples, and carried out DNA quality control with Qubit and Nanodrop

Adult male smooth newt at @nhm-london.bsky.social Urban Nature Garden

Great first day behind the scenes at the @nhm-london.bsky.social, looking at the dry and wet collections

Extremely excited to be at @nhm-london.bsky.social this week for a course on Integrated Biodiversity Discovery

A Tachus species, a springtail hunter

Tachyporus dispar, with 4 hairs on the edge of each elytra

I got one to species! Rugilis rufipes, with a skinny neck and funny little eyes. I love those diesel elytra

Superfamily Aleocharinae, chunky with a mohair waistcoat, adorable

Already amazed by the diverse morphology of these little rove beetles. This one is superfamily Tachyporinae, tribe Tachyporini

First try at staphylinid ID, for dietary metabarcoding. I'm not going to try to get them all to species, or even genus! This one is superfamily Staphylininae, I think

Happy to be back in the lab with my spiders. This is a male Neriene clathrata, I think

Last day of the @nerc-eof.bsky.social course on #Python for #Bioinformatics today, learning how to process #eDNA and other #sequencing data in FASTQ format from #NGS platforms like Illumina, using biopython tools from the module seqIO 🥼🧪🧬💻 #Genomics

Excited to be learning #Python for #Bioinformatics with @nerc-eof.bsky.social today, building my skills for ecological networks analysis once I have all my #metabarcoding data

Thank you this is extremely helpful!

Exciting talk by @maximuminsect.bsky.social today on driver ants, and such an interesting finding that an extra caste in one species may result in niche differentiation to explain two otherwise similar species occupying the same habitat

Drassodes with the trochanter notches and tubular spinnerets, most likely cupreus, I couldn't get a good view on a chelicera to confirm @britishspiders.bsky.social #Arachnids #Spiders

Thanks for the tip

Xysticus juvenile, likely a ground dwelling species @britishspiders.bsky.social #Arachnids #Spiders

Pardosa amenata, however this is a juvenile so I'm less confident

Alopecosa juvenile, I think

Pardosa nigriceps, adult female

My first go at spider ID! Pardosa pullata

Gorgeous metalic blue on this Leistus spinibarbis 💙

A very nice Leistus spinibarbis, I couldn't capture the electric blue sheen