there's a certain way certain people write fiction about disability that really sets my teeth on edge, and it's an approach that I can only describe as 'educational hugboxing' in this, portrayal of disability must be constantly affirming, and it must use specific and correct terminology (🧵)

Acceptable answers are b, c, and d. Jingle Bells is not a Christmas song. Also the person who wrote it, James Lord Pierpont, was my great great uncle and also a terrible person.

Closing out my year with a journal editor shocker 🧵 Checking new manuscripts today I reviewed a paper attributing 2 papers to me I did not write. A daft thing for an author to do of course. But intrigued I web searched up one of the titles and that's when it got real weird...

amazing photo on spanish wikipedia's chinchilla article

Funny animal videos no longer being trustworthy just fucking sucks all around. I love the wonder of animal behavior and what it says about the experience of being alive. It's because it happened in reality that it's so fun. It's not fun if it was just made up. There's no wonder there.

Ordering coffee in North America is baffling if you're used to European terminology. "Could I get a peppermint mocha, please?" "Sure. Do you want the latte or the coffee?" ???

Festive update on chondrichthyan jaw evolution: Evolution of chondrichthyan jaw morphology, from ecological generalists to specialists, led by Ben Griffin, with help from @evopalaeo.bsky.social @euphanerops.bsky.social @emilyrayfield.bsky.social Pablo Milla Carmona and Zerina Johanson

What Should You Do About H3N2 Flu? There's a lot to worry about right now on the winter virus front, but get your flu shot anyway. Seriously. Get your flu shot, by @angierasmussen.bsky.social rasmussenretorts.substack.com/p/what-you-s...

Our manuscript is now out in @royalsocietypublishing.org! We tested hypotheses that Cenozoic climatic change influenced the evolution of the cranial, appendicular, & axial skeleton in carnivorans. @tsengzj.bsky.social @hlusko.bsky.social 🧵 1/n royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article...

4/ Ventilation saves lives. Clean indoor air, through ventilation or filtration, dramatically cuts the spread of respiratory infections. It’s time to treat air quality like food hygiene: a basic public health requirement.

Excited to launch the new improved Reproducible Code guide from @britishecologicalsociety.org @methodsinecoevol.bsky.social FREE online here! www.britishecologicalsociety.org//wp-content/... Amazing work by some very talented ECRs. We hope it’s useful!

Here are just a few of the many fish I painted this year (not to scale). It's fun to stick a bunch of them together into a collage and see some of the incredible diversity of body shape and color patterns. Merry Fishmas! 🐡🐟🐠

Neuroanatomical convergence between pterosaurs and non-avian paravians in the evolution of flight | Bronzati et al. | Current Biology www.cell.com/current-biol...

An actual conversation I once had with my father: "Someone wants to see you when you're in town." Who? "Dunno. Maybe one of your old teachers? She's Protestant. Or maybe Catholic but doesn't go to church much." Well, what does she look like? "Dunno." Any other clues? "Nope."

I really can't recommend the Macro Committee enough - we have tons of fun and organise a really cool annual meeting :)

As we mourn Rob Reiner, don’t skip this: he was, pretty much, personally responsible for overturning California’s Prop 8 banning same sex marriage. www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/bus...

I am late to this party, but golly this is a cool preprint on the relationship between body size and urban tolerance: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

This is a nice little synthesis about what we currently know about the effect of artificial light at night on owls (tl;dr ALAN is bad for owls that eat mammals but maybe okay for owls that eat insects, and human noise is probably bad for all owls): onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

What a beautiful bird.

JOB ALERT! Collection Manager job going in Palaeontology at the Australian Museum in Sydney, Australia iworkfor.nsw.gov.au/job/collecti...

New paper on brood parasite genomics! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

UK sky nerds: the aurora is currently visible from downtown Aberdeen.

New paper out. If you like colorful birds, hybridization, and phylogenetics, read on! 🧵https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3003501

Join the BES Macro committee! We're recruiting a vice chair and 1-2 ordinary members to help us make macroecology & macroevolution a better place. More information on how to apply in the link, and come chat at #BES2025 if you happen to be around! www.britishecologicalsociety.org//wp-content/...

Thrilled to announce a Postdoc opportunity in our group on the evolutionary genetics and ecology of colour. Wonderful system, great collaborators, and room to shape your own ideas. Apply by 7 Jan: jobs.helsinki.fi/job/13477181...

Why the HECK doesn't Wiley's editorial software warn me before I invite someone to review their own manuscript. WHY. (With apologies to the person who just received some probably baffling emails from me 😂)

I am irrationally annoyed by how complicated and expensive it is to get between Aberdeen, Scotland, and Leipzig, Germany. I'm rapidly approaching the point where I book an truly unhinged itinerary and hope I still can get reimbursed 😂.

“Northern resident killer whales appear to use dolphins as ‘scouts’, in a surprising cooperative hunting strategy” www.theguardian.com/environment/...

A curated global dataset of social contact between diverse language communities www.nature.com/articles/s41...

“Air pollution fell substantially as Paris restricted car traffic and made way for parks, people-streets and bike-lanes.” Better for the climate, better for health, better for livability and quality of life. Common sense. Such a no-brainer, it’s remarkable that more cities HAVEN’T done the same.

High-resolution land-use maps from 1960 to 2100 🌎🧪 🌐 www.cell.com/one-earth/fu...

Well, geez, that's cool.

Effects of future climate extreme heat events and land use changes on land vertebrates "By [2100], ... 7895 species are expected to face extreme heat events and/or unsuitable land use changes across their entire range, & thus potentially go globally extinct" onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

As parents are helping their kids consider colleges, this is my perennial reminder that state schools often have lower price tags, yes, but private schools, including many small liberal arts schools, often have better aid packages, and are thus often cheaper in the end (but may be more competitive).

New paper! Here we look at shape evolution of the mandible in Pelagiaria, a group of open-ocean fishes that includes tuna and mackerel. We find that shape disparity accumulated rapidly at the origin of the clade at around the K/Pg boundary... academic.oup.com/evlett/advan...

🪶🌎🧪 WE'RE HIRING!!! Want to band fabulous birds on a far-flung island in the Western Pacific? We need to fill these 2 positions ASAP. More information here: birdpop.org/docs/job...

Nearly half of all countries have fewer than ten active plant taxonomists, and in 41% of countries they're all male. Global review by Simões et al. (2025). 🌏🧪🌐 www.cell.com/trends/plant...

You: Catherine, why don't you use genAI? Me: Because there are not, in fact, any wild penguins in Stonehaven, Scotland. (Screenshot from Google AI.)

So excited to share our new work out in @evolletters.bsky.social today! doi.org/10.1093/evle... Sexual signals and preferences for them often differ across groups, contributing to reproductive isolation. But how do new signals evolve if females already have preferences for existing ones? (1/4)

We'll be hosting a joint Crossing the Palaeontological–Ecological Gap (CPEG) meeting & Conservation Paleobiology Symposium @ucl.ac.uk in London in August 2027, which aims to bridge spatial and temporal gradients between palaeontology, ecology, and conservation: www.ucl.ac.uk/mathematical...

A study on 1.7 million people in Hong Kong shows superior hybrid immunity to Covid in people who got vaccinated before infection vs. people who got infected first. "Our findings are a direct rebuttal to arguments for natural immunity," the authors write. doi.org/10.1016/j.va...

I love all the things we have been learning about avian eyes in the past few years.

"Diversity dynamics do not appear to be governed by clade-level processes expected from adaptive radiations or diversity dependence." 👀👀👀 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Species Overlap and Phylogenetic Relatedness Result in Community Statistical Non-Independence | Tsang & Cadotte | Ecology Letters onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

For a while, they said if you needed tech help, ask a 10yo. But current 10-20yos didn't have to explore and click around and futz with things to get them to work, so if it's not immediately obvious, they can't do it. Basically if you're 30-50 you're just doing tech support for everyone forever.

This year's flu season is not looking good 😬😷 www.independent.co.uk/news/health/...

JOB ALERT! 🦜🔭🌿 Are you passionate about #Birds, #Ecology, #Fieldwork, #Research? The University of Salford is looking for a #ResearchTechnician to assist with ecological monitoring of #Ringneckedparakeets in Manchester, UK. More info & how to apply 👇 Hurry! Closes 15 Dec @salforduni.bsky.social

When I worked at Brown, it was an open secret: many more women applied than men, so to keep a rough gender parity in the student body, men got a big boost in admissions. Trump's attacks on DEI may hurt men in college admissions. hechingerreport.org/an-unexpecte...

Email: The Time Allocation Collection Period is 1 August - 30 November. Please fill in this form for these dates. Form: The Time Allocation Collection Period is 2 December - 27 January. Please fill in this form for these dates. Me: Hello mysterious time lords (aka Finance). Which of these is true?