My journal article with @danjbecker.bsky.social , @colincarlson.bsky.social and @viralemergence.org is featured on the @commsbio.nature.com homepage this week!! www.nature.com/commsbio/ check it out to see a cool bat picture by Brock Fenton!! 🦇💗🦇💗

Gestation length both shapes and is shaped by other life history traits in terrestrial eutherian mammals doi.org/10.1093/evle... Now in @evolletters.bsky.social by Thodoris Danis et al.

2025. Viral epidemic potential is not uniformly distributed across the bat phylogeny www.nature.com/articles/s42...

I'm excited to announce that the first chapter of dissertation is published in @commsbio.nature.com !!! and i feel super fortunate that it could be published during bat week 💗🦇 www.nature.com/articles/s42... @danjbecker.bsky.social @colincarlson.bsky.social @/amandavicentesantos

a nice summary of new work led by @carolinecummings.bsky.social and in collaboration with @colincarlson.bsky.social and @viralemergence.org on the distribution of zoonotic risk across bat species.

Hope you can join us for three full days (June 2-4th, 2026) of great science in a beautiful setting!

just in time for #batweek --Phylogenetic and ML analyses show that viral epidemic potential is not uniform among bats: virulence, transmissibility, and death burden cluster within distinct clades.🦇@carolinecummings.bsky.social @colincarlson.bsky.social @viralemergence.org go.sn.pub/acnbg1

Super excited to finally share this! #CollectionsAreEssential

🦇🦠 New preprint - in a long-term effort led by the amazing @mayajuman.bsky.social, we've shown that the ML tools developed by @viralemergence.org let us efficiently screen museum collections for pathogens with pandemic potential 🎉🔓 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

🚨 NEW: Climate change is already causing 30,000 deaths per year - a global annual economic loss of $100-350B USD - but the true damage is probably 10x higher. Out TODAY in Nature Climate Change: the first systematic look at the science of "health impact attribution" 🔓 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A few words about purple martins—how to help them, how to help all migratory birds, how to help birds that don’t migrate—in this week’s essay. Gift link via @nytopinion: www.nytimes.com/2025/09/01/o...

Be sure to check out what a few of the ICB co authors of Understanding #climate change threats to vertebrate #wildlife by studying #ecoimmunology across #biological scales doi.org/10.1093/icb/... are up to Fagre www.annafagre.com Becker & Simonis beckerlab.weebly.com

ICB Understand more about how #climate change threatens #organismal health and #ecological stability in a myriad of ways - read : Understanding #climatechange threats to #vertebrate #wildlife by studying #ecoimmunology across biological scales Fagre et al doi.org/10.1093/icb/...

🚀 gratia 0.11.0 is out! Now has a paper in JOSS — please cite 📄 doi.org/10.21105/jos... Experimental parallel processing ⚡ New assemble() for building plots 🎨 Better support for complex families + new diagnostics 🧪 Lots of bug fixes + polish ✨ 👉 gavinsimpson.github.io/gratia/ #Rstats

Hey wild immunologists of blue sky… do you work on a non-model taxa??? Would you have 15 min to spare to zoom in and share your research with my comparative immunology class? I’m looking to spotlight real research this semester. Please spread the word and reach out if you’re interested!

Are you an early-career biologist or ecologist who would benefit from an invited seminar? Would you like to come to UMaine next fall or spring to give a talk? Leave a brief comment with some info about what you do. I'm co-hosting our seminar series again, and am filling out our rosters.

🚨 First PhD chapter is out! My work thus far, with @andy2dobson.bsky.social We found that formerly common species have declined the fastest, on average. 📄 North American bird declines are driven by reductions in common species | Science Advances www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Everyone working in a STEM field should read this - ‘writing is thinking’ www.nature.com/articles/s44...

🦇 NEW RESEARCH: Our 3-year study of Australian flying foxes identified six co-circulating coronaviruses, with highest rates of infection and co-infection in young bats, and evidence of circulating recombinants 🧪🌏 🧵 Available open access in @natcomms.nature.com 📄 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Are you a PhD student, have an offer, or have had an offer recently rescinded from a US university? If so, Western (in London, ON, Canada) has a new scholarship program for you! Check out this news story. I can vouch for this university! You will love it. www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

The 2025 Bat Infectious Disease meeting is now on. Looking forward to several excellent talks, along with talks by Rita and Victoria from my lab. #BatID Thanks to Dr. Cara Brook and her lab for organizing and hosting us!

🚨 New publication out today. Bats are over 1480 species. In this latest article, we discuss the diversity within bats and their immune systems. Elegantly led by the Becker and Frank laboratories. nyaspubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... @danjbecker.bsky.social @bat-lady.bsky.social

Infectious Disease Modelling starter pack update! Many more modellers have joined Bluesky recently so this update is overdue. Pls keep on sending suggestions! (bio should contain experience relevant for this pack) IDModelling pack 1: go.bsky.app/86Ao1a5 IDModelling pack 2 : go.bsky.app/2oBB7KX

🦠🌿🐦🧪 How can biodiversity monitoring help global efforts in disease surveillance? With ✨ fantastic ✨ colleagues from @viralemergence.org and the @geobon.org working group on One Health, we try to identify three key lessons for the future. 🧵 A short thread! academic.oup.com/bioscience/a...

We created an initial webpage at EEIDforum.org. We're in beta testing phase, but there is a job board with a few postings, feel free to put up your own EEID related job ads there.

Do you study wildlife disease? Don't just share your sequences - share your testing data! We've developed a minimum data standard and an R package to help you, and wrote a little how-to-share-data handbook for disease ecology and One Health surveillance projects 🦇🦟🦠🗺️🔢 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

📝 EDITORS and BOARD MEMBERS in the One Health / virology / disease ecology world: We'd love to work with you to incorporate the WDDS standard into your journal's data sharing requirements for wildlife disease studies. It's simple, flexible, and what your authors should already be doing.

This project started with pharos.viralemergence.org, which is a global dashboard for wildlife disease research and surveillance. We're still working on improving the PHAROS interface, so in the meantime, we wanted to put tools out there, so every researcher can put their data *somewhere.*

NEW! 🎉 We need wildlife disease surveillance to predict epidemics, but data sharing is rare - we found that only 2-3% of studies share raw data. So, we spent three years developing a data standard and R package to help get wildlife disease data into FAIR repositories. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

We are hiring a technician in the Simonis Lab at Auburn U! This is a two-year position with responsibilities for scouting and performing bat capture surveys at field sites (e.g. private and public lands, highway culverts). Check out more details and submit materials here: forms.gle/tEUNyRc1hG3f...

Vertebrate hotspots are expected to see increased climate extremes in the coming decades; often in places where animals may be most naive to such events. New research out of my lab led by Dr. van den Bosch in @globalchangebio.bsky.social 🧪🌐🌏 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Today 10th of June at 4 PM Panama time, I'll be giving a Tupper talk @stri_panama on self-medication in bats. Curious? Join me online and discover what bats are up to when they are immune-challenged! 🍈🦇 smithsonian.zoom.us/j/8724629288... Password: 438162; Webinar ID: 872 4629 2885

I'm beyond excited to announce that I will be joining the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Oklahoma as an Assistant Professor in January 2026! Belasen Lab @ou.edu coming soon 🐸 ❤️

An update from the team on the uncertain future of our program and the impact of NSF budget cuts. Please share and reach out 🦠

🚨 Our latest paper is out today in @natcomms.nature.com Surveillance of avian influenza through bird guano in remote regions of the global south to uncover transmission dynamics www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Wonderful new 5-year postdoctoral fellowship opportunity at the University of Cambridge on #Biodiversity: www.christs.cam.ac.uk/darwin-hamie...

I am recruiting graduate students for Spring 2026 in my Lab at Auburn University. Please share broadly🦇 simonislab.weebly.com/opportunitie... linking to 🧪 and 🦊

I'm looking for a postdoc in quantitative ecology / macroecology to start in summer/fall 2025 in my lab at Oklahoma State University. Please spread the word www.gilbertecology.com/opportunities

🧪 New paper out at Molecular Ecology! We find that diet quality impacts host ability to tolerate infection and use transcriptomics to determine the molecular mechanisms underlying these diet-driven differences. This was a fun collab between @durantlab.bsky.social & @lewislab.bsky.social labs.

Last chance to get your abstracts in for the 20th International Bat Research Conference (IBRC) in Australia in August! It's shaping up to be an exciting program, in an incredible world heritage location, with diverse workshops and field trips. Abstracts due this Wednesday 14th May!! www.ibrc.org

it's midge

Nature reports that the National Science Foundation has stopped awarding new grants and allotting funds to existing ones. All of them. @colincarlson.bsky.social says that unless the freeze is lifted, it “is going to destroy people's labs.” 2/10 www.nature.com/articles/d41...

I talked to Nature about the latest development at NSF, which is a five-alarm fire for American science. The scale of immediate impact is massive. We narrowly escaped this affecting @viralemergence.org for now, but will have to shut down in a few months if this stays. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

BREAKING: NSF has frozen all grant funding, as of yesterday. It's unclear when they will resume funding awards, or why the pause has been put in place. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

i'm honored to have been elected as an ESA Early Career Fellow! big congrats to all the fellows here!

Our study highlights geographic hotspots correlating with areas of diminished smallpox vaccination coverage and heightened zoonotic outbreak risks. @viralemergence.org, led by PhD student Katie Tseng with @danjbecker.bsky.social, @colincarlson.bsky.social @roryjgibb.bsky.social and Pilar Fernandez

🚨Excited to share our latest research published in @commsbio.bsky.social , where we've developed a predictive model that integrates both host ecological traits and viral genomic features to identify potential reservoir hosts for Orthopoxviruses, including mpox virus. www.nature.com/articles/s42...

If you have experienced direct harm to your work/lab/job due to recent changes at US NSF, & are willing to share this on behalf of the Am. Society of Naturalists and NSF, please DM/ email me ASAP (this is time-sensitive) or submit story here sites.google.com/view/scienti... Please share widely

Just a few more days to apply for a PhD with me! Use new technologies to study movement and ecology of serotine bats in UK. Evidence can guide future rabies control strategies, helping bats and people. Click on project 'Understanding transmission..' here: www.surrey.ac.uk/bbsrc-wessex... #PhD #bats

41/47 (87%) of NIH study sections are cancelled this week Frustrating to see all this good research stalled (& not funded) You can search for study sections that ‘did not meet as scheduled’ here with ones with * ⤵️ www.csr.nih.gov/RevPanelsAnd...