Hey you! I am still on the market for jobs this fall! I am an entomologist who specializes in inclusive biology teaching (15+ semesters of collegiate instruction) and a broad array of research skills spanning collection & ID, molecular work (RNAi, Genomics), and phenotyping (behavior, physiology)🧪

I'm hiring a postdoc (start date flexible) and a PhD student (for Fall 2027) to work in any area of computational phylogenetics! More info here: mhibbins.github.io I will be attending both PEQG and Evolution in June, so please reach out if you want to chat at these meetings!

I am not a podcast person by any means, but I'm excited about this series, and starting strong with my long time mentor Mike Gates!

So cool to see my Swedish microhymenoptera colleagues Emma Kärrnäs and Julia Stigenberg featured in here: www.theguardian.com/environment/...

The Chinese banyan stem gall first found in Hawaii in 2012 finally has a name! Meet Josephiella manana, and its associate Gibsonoma kuewa. Fun small project with @kmagnacca.bsky.social in sorting out some of these introduced micro wasps of Hawaii. Link to paper: tinyurl.com/ych93swd

It's always exciting to see images of the critters that I've described live, even if it is a bit blurry. This is Kavayva bodoquenensis, a rare? Neotropical genus of eurytomids associated with Guarea (Meliaceae) seeds. www.inaturalist.org/observations...

North America (south to the Darién Gap) is the best continent, judged solely on the basis of gall wasps.

Wouldn't it be nice if you could say goodbye to TurboTax and file your taxes for free, online, and directly with the IRS? I have a bill to get that done.

It's looking increasingly likely that I'll be hiring a 3-year computational pop-gen postdoc/PhD-level scientific programmer to start this Fall (2026). If you or someone you know is defending soon, and looking for a position, please DM/write to me! Thanks!

Job alert! Post-doc position available in the Tsutsui lab at UC Berkeley. I'm specifically looking for someone optimize and scale RNA interference for invasive ant control and eradication. Happy to take questions at [email protected]. Spread the word! aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF05325

MBE is excited to launch our newest Call for Papers on the Major Transitions of Life, covering all aspects of phylogenomic research. 🔗 academic.oup.com/mbe/pages/call-for-papers-on-the-major-transitions-of-life Guest Editors: Davide Pisani Anja Spang #evobio #molbio #phylogenetics

Join us here at @laurentianu.bsky.social as we rebuild our ecology/evolution group. We are hiring an assistant professor in animal ecology Working with me is a treat, so that's a bonus not mentioned in the ad. laurentian.ca/about/career...

Meet some brand new oak apple galls from Mexico! We described five new Amphibolips species, including A. megakokka which produces the largest known gall by a single wasp in the Americas (>11cm in diameter). mapress.com/zt/article/v...

Open postdoc position in my lab at Cornell, conducting comparative and experimental studies on transcriptomic responses to diet and toxins, utilizing the milkweed-insect community. Background in molecular bio & herbivory desired. academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/31867

📢ISH SPONSORED MEMBERSHIP OFFER! 📌Sponsorship is primarily intended for members who are unable to afford membership and based in a country other than the 30 countries with the highest HDI. 📆Application Deadline: March 31st 🔗Application form: www.hymenopterists.org/apply-for-sp...

Hi all. I am very excited that after 6 years I finally got my phylogenetic comparative methods book and online exercises online. Feel free to use and share. The book is here: nhcooper123.github.io/pcm-primer/. Note that it is not finished, we had to abandon it before the sunk costs fallacy broke us

Gorgeous fly but ugh I hate the name so much, apparently the naming right was won at the 2021 Australian Museum Foundation Gala Dinner auction...🤑

On #TaxonomistAppreciationDay I want to highlight some of the recent new species that I've described along with colleagues, many are from the global south where much of this diversity is from (and still awaits discover). First up, two species of herb gall wasps and a parasitoid from Sichuan, China.

My big monograph is finally out in @ejtaxonomy.bsky.social right on #taxonomistappreciationday! 169 new species of flat wasps from Australia, many of them with remarkable head modifications for seeking their hosts. So excited to see this published after 8 years, available free and open access. 🧪

So you are using IQ-TREE to estimate a tree for "deep time" phylogenetics using amino acid alignments. There is a lot of confusion about how to test model fit. Here are some suggestions.

Are you a researcher studying Hymenoptera, and based in a country not in the top 30 human development index (HDI)? Here is your chance to join the @hymenopterists.bsky.social society for free! The application closes on March 31! Please share widely 🧪 www.hymenopterists.org/apply-for-sp...

Undergrad and graduate students! Could your work benefit from visiting one of the NHMLAC’s collections? Apply for our Collections Study Award, due Apr. 1. I’d love to have students make use of our Entomology collection! Details here: tinyurl.com/bdduefsy

New #OpenAccess work by Z. Griebenow in #RESSystematicEnt explored the #phylogeny of the #Leptanillinae (Hymenoptera: #Formicidae) ant family using high-throughput sequencing & Bayesian total-evidence inference, with accommodation of systematic bias. doi.org/10.1111/syen.70038 #UCEs #Phylogenomics

The 2026 National Science Foundation budget is $8.75 Billion.

We're thrilled to announce the Ctrl-Z Award, a US$2,500 prize for researchers “who discover substantial errors in their published work and take meaningful steps to correct the scientific record." Covered by @nature.com today; read more here: centerforscientificintegrity.org/2026/03/10/a...

Just in case anybody out there wants a postdoc with some of the coolest people in the field, here it is! jobs.anu.edu.au/jobs/researc...

Scathophagidae is no more!!

The discovery of a new “species” invariably leads to the discovery of new “species interactions” - new connections in the web of life. Here, the discovery of a new gall wasp also uncovered EIGHT new interactions with other insects - some likely new species as well. #biodiversity @ymilesz.bsky.social

𝘉𝘦𝘭𝘰𝘯𝘰𝘤𝘯𝘦𝘮𝘢 𝘮𝘦𝘴𝘰𝘢𝘮𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘯𝘢 is a new gall #wasp found in the galls of a live #oak Quercus oleoides in Mexico. The research increases the systematic knowledge of poorly known species in the genus Cynipini in the Neotropics: doi.org/10.3897/jhr....

This looks like a great workshop for people interested in learning how to do lcWGS and UCE work! 🧪

Thanks to micro-CT and www.antscan.info, you can now explore high resolution, 3D ant images from anywhere in the world. Fantastic work from Julian Katzke, Francisco Hita Garcia, @economo.bsky.social, Thomas van de Kamp and colleagues just dropped: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Regrettably, I have decided to decommission SimpleMappr, www.simplemappr.net on September 1, 2026. You may read about its origins, what others have accomplished in its 18 year run, and the reasons why I must turn it off in a document I wrote last night bit.ly/simplemappr.

#NewSpeciesAlert! We discovered & described a new species of gall wasp, Belonocnema mesoamericana, on the central American live oak, Quercus oleoides. Great collaboration between Alejandro Zaldivar & lab at #UNAM, @ymilesz.bsky.social at #EdinburghUni, and my lab at #RiceUniversity. #biodiversity

Meet Belonocnema mesoamericana, a new species of Belonocnema that we described on Mexican live oak! This is a fun little critter that makes velvety root galls, a great find by @scottpegan.bsky.social and Alejandro Zaldívar-Riverón's team at UNAM. jhr.pensoft.net/article/1851...

What Derek said, also I could've done without the old man yelling at cloud view of "morphology good, DNA bad", that's so Sanger era talking point, get over it the field has moved far beyond that!

New #OpenAccess research by M. Prous, @niinakiljunen.bsky.social et al. in #RESSystematicEnt found that multiple full-length variants of the mitochondrial COI DNA barcode region are prevalent in north European sawflies. doi.org/10.1111/syen.70031 @gkergoat.bsky.social @wileyecology.bsky.social

🎉 Huge news for BHL: The Field Museum is taking over the hosting of BHL’s website, servers & infrastructure, ensuring long-term stability and access for its 63+ million pages of open biodiversity literature. Learn more: blog.biodiversitylibrary.org/2026/02/tran... #BHLTransition #ILoveBHL 🌍 📚 🧪

Marie Curie fellowships are madness this year. A score of 97% required for funding. To all those who didn't succeed - you and your project are probably brilliant, hang in there and keep trying

I worked on euphorine braconids for my PhD but I haven't really touched it since, so it was nice to be included and help contribute in this updated version of the dichotomous key. Hope it will be useful to people as the old version was to me. cjai.biologicalsurvey.ca/articles/ssv...

just a little baby child (from @mosquitolab.bsky.social's pitfall samples; I can see how this one got sorted into the beetle pile)

No joke: I got angry hate mail today for writing an obituary of a Black woman scientist—because the person felt she did didn’t deserve the recognition. Which just makes me want to share it again: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

INSECT TAXONOMY IN THE 21ST CENTURY @entsocamerica.bsky.social Online, April 27-29! Featuring keynotes from Rudolf Meier @rudolf-meier.bsky.social, Erinn Fagan-Jeffries, and Dominic Evangelista. Now accepting contributed talks! Grant deadline Feb 4, abstracts due Mar 6. entsoc.org/membership/b...

Cool 🐜 science 🧪

Responsible publication of your research! To help you do this @nicolasgaltier.bsky.social and coauthors have put together a handy database of academia-friendly journals, DAFNEE. You can read about it in their article recently published in @jevbio.bsky.social: doi.org/10.1093/jeb/...

Calling all OrthoFinder users! We’ve just released GLADE, a tool to infer gene gains, losses, duplications, and ancestral genomes across a phylogeny. GLADE runs directly on OrthoFinder results. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... github.com/lauriebelch/... (1/10)

Excited to share a new piece of work in @embojournal.org Parasitoid wasps hijack a bacterial gene that governs venoms against host. Coauthors include @rokaslab.bsky.social and others. Read more from: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

New work in @Cell Research We conducted a large-scale structural genomics analysis of #insects, integrating phylogenomics with protein structure prediction to uncover hidden functions and evolutionary insights across the insect tree of life. Read more from www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The Trump regime got rid of 10,109 PhDs in science and related fields, representing 14% of the total number of PhD scientists in the federal workforce.

The preprint of the first of the batch of parasitoid wasp genomes that we are generating is now out. Erythrina gall wasp is an invasive pest on the Hawaiian wiliwili tree, we were able to generate a HiFi genome using 1/10 of a flowcell, costing only ~$100 for the sequencing.