Happy to share that my third PhD chapter has been published in Evolution @journal-evo.bsky.social. In this paper, we investigated how developmental temperature (26°C or 30°C) and inbreeding affect sexual traits in male guppies (Poecilia reticulata).👇

📢 New work with @gonzalezlabbcn.bsky.social out now in Molecular Biology and Evolution! Transgenerational effects of heat shock 🥵 on gene regulation 🧬 and fitness-related traits in natural Drosophila 🪰 populations: academic.oup.com/mbe/article/...

🔥 We'll soon be advertising a 2-year Postdoctoral Research Fellow position at UCL, focusing on insect single-cell mitochondrial genomics. 🔥 More details coming soon. Feel free to get in touch in this sounds fun or share with anyone who might be interested.

Female discrimination between sperm has been seen in animals, affecting reproductive outcomes, but what about large mammals? This study shows that the baboon #vagina can alter #sperm survival via vaginal immune responses & pH, depending on male genetic relatedness @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/4sL2Zxl

April 1st is Live Comedy Day, the only day when it's legal to watch live comedy. So come and see my show in Leeds: leedsheritagetheatres.com/whats-on/alasdair-beckett-king-2026/#book

Sperm can “age” independently of the male, when stored in male or female reproductive tracts. Our meta-analysis finds widespread evidence across animals (including abstinence in men). Important consequences for fertility, sexual selection, haploid selection! doi.org/10.1098/rspb...

Here comes the March Science Café. On the menu: - Drones, Romans and river crossings - Growing blood vessels on-a-chip - Weather Forecasting With AI Too good to miss! Just £6 (u18 free) otleysciencefestival.co.uk/science-cafes/

Join us in Copenhagen in June for our summer course on programming in R! - Aimed at PhD students in behavioural ecology, others also welcome - No prior programming knowledge needed Deadline for sign-up: May 1 More info here: programmingintrocph.weebly.com

Like #hemocytes? I'm advertising a 3 year, BBSRC #postdoc position, in #Edinburgh, using #Drosophila & human cells to understand sex differences in the regulation of #macrophage function, an exciting collaboration with the Bénézech and Wood labs. Please share! 🪰🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DQU604/p...

ICYMI: New online! The consequences of rising temperatures for animal fertility

📣 JOBS!!! We're looking for new colleagues in the School of Biology @bioscienceleeds.bsky.social - two associate profs (plant sci and animal biology) and a lecturer (ecology/zoology)... jobs.leeds.ac.uk/vacancy.aspx... jobs.leeds.ac.uk/vacancy.aspx... jobs.leeds.ac.uk/vacancy.aspx...

Happy to be able to share our review of the consequences of rising temperatures on animal fertility, led by @rhondasnook.bsky.social with @liamdougherty.bsky.social and Claudia Fricke. Research is getting active in this area but there's still a lot of unknowns... rdcu.be/e7uGm

The final part of the story: "The arduous path to obligate asexuality in Daphnia" is out in #ProcB 🥳 royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article.... 1. Instead of comparing long-established asexuals to sexuals, we generated new asexual lineages to observe the transition in action.

Exposure to mild #HeatStress can promote stress resilience & healthy aging ("heat hormesis"). siusylvialee.bsky.social &co characterize #transcriptomic & #chromatin accessibility changes during heat #hormesis in #Celegans, identifying several novel regulators @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/4cJFEa9

Compelling meta-analytic evidence for female fitness benefits of polyandry in arthropods by Yan et al. academic.oup.com/evolut/advan...

🚨 Postdoc opportunity to study memory or nutrition in #Drosophila 🪰 I am looking for a candidate to support for a 3 year Addison Wheeler Fellowship application lnkd.in/e2rvNf5x Interested? Please send a CV & cover letter with brief research outline by 20th February to [email protected]

The NERC Peer Review College is now always open. With broader, more inclusive criteria and a quick 10–20 minute self-nomination process. We welcome academic and non-academic experts, at all career stages, in the UK and internationally. Apply now: engagementhub.ukri.org/nerc-funding...

Excited to share our tour de force in identifying neurons in the brain as targets of a seminal peptide thanks to Karthik Nallasivan and @deepanshund.bsky.social @mcf-uom.bsky.social @fbmh-uom.bsky.social published in @elife.bsky.social elifesciences.org/articles/98283

Why not publish your research with a Society Journal? 🧪🌍 The Linnean Society is committed to publishing high-quality and ground-breaking scientific research across the four themes of botany, zoology, biology and evolution, striving to make these accessible & engaging to a global audience. 🧵(1/4)

The Effect of Differing Levels of Intrasexual and Intersexual Selection on Survival and Reproduction Under a Heatwave Ecol&Evol

Heat can make #fruitfly males sterile at temperatures below their lethal limits. We explore if tissue-specific heat shock protein expression can explain why using 6 #Drosophila species: @chsmithson.bsky.social et al. @ejduncan.bsky.social @amandabretman.bsky.social doi.org/10.1093/jeb/...

Hot off the press! New paper in Biology Letters (@royalsocietypublishing.org) showing that heatwaves impair female but not male fertility in burying beetles 🐞🌡️ Huge congratulations to Izzy (@izzygrieve.bsky.social) on her first first-authored paper! 🥳🙌 royalsocietypublishing.org/rsbl/article...

Wishing all of our followers a Happy New Year 2026! We kick off with the January Issue of JEB online now: academic.oup.com/jeb/issue/39/1 📸 A sea otter (Enhydra lutris) in the water at the Toba Aquarium, Japan. Photo Credit Tomohiro Harano

📢Out now in @jevbio.bsky.social, we tried to work out whether heat limits of survival or fertility are reflected in heat shock protein expression across Drosophila 🪰 species. The answer is, well, a bit. With the wonderful @chsmithson.bsky.social @ejduncan.bsky.social doi.org/10.1093/jeb/...

When academic expertise meet popular culture 📻 Find out what happened when Leeds researchers Tim Benton & Stefan Kepinski visited BBC Radio 4's #TheArchers (and the fictional village of Ambridge!) to advise on the future of UK farming. 👀 bit.ly/3YANfzQ @afnnetwork.bsky.social

🎙️ Reproduction involves decisions about when to mate and who with. We know that high temperatures affect fertility, but how does this affect mating decisions and sexual selection within populations? @tillypemburysmith.bsky.social and @rhondasnook.bsky.social talk about their work with fruit files

Who really lives fast and dies young? In Drosophila, females show faster ageing and reproductive senescence than males across social environments, overturning sexual selection predictions and highlighting social effects on ageing. academic.oup.com/evlett/advan... @laurenmharrison.bsky.social

Happy to share our Current Opinion on the 'Neural basis of sexually dimorphic decision-making', written with Megan Day. Many thanks to @jefferis.bsky.social for the invite to be part of this special issue on Sexual Dimorphism in the Brain. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

UK to rejoin Erasmus student mobility programme from 2027. The UK will rejoin the European Union’s flagship mobility programme for students in the 2027-28 academic year, the Cabinet Office has announced. www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-u...

Every year #ESEB distinguishes a young evolutionary biologist with the John Maynard Smith Prize! 📣Nominations for the 2026 prize are due by January 15th!📣 Find out more here: eseb.org/prizes-fundi...

Please share 📢 We have a Postdoc position available here @uniofeastanglia.bsky.social to develop innovative genetic control strategies for insect agricultural pests in collaboration with @imperialcollegeldn.bsky.social vacancies.uea.ac.uk/vacancies/19...

Delighted to see our work picked up by @theguardian.com this is a real window of opportunity for us to reduce carbon emissions to give the bears a hope at survival before it really is too late.

Dr Alice Godden from @biouea.bsky.social has been the lead researcher on a study that has found that polar bears may be adapting to climate change. Read more: https://bit.ly/3YmeMVg #PolarBears #ClimateChange #ResearchMatters #ThisIsUEA

POSTDOC recruitment! We’re looking for a post-doc to join us to work on the (epi)genetic basis of inbreeding depression as part of the ANR-funded project FRIDA macrostomum.wordpress.com/the-genetic-... Please share!

BREAKING: Four major publishers agree deals with UK university sector Elsevier, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis and Wiley meet “sector-agreed thresholds” in long-running talks Free to read www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-o...

New paper out from our lab today in Biology Letters! This work, led by our former lab tech @avigayillev.bsky.social and lab alum Isabella Martinez, used hemiclonal analysis to show that longer matings with previously mated females are advantageous to males! doi.org/10.1098/rsbl...

The UK has regained the top spot for winning European Research Council consolidator grants, with the country taking more mid-career awards than any other country for the first time since Brexit. @jgro-the.bsky.social reports #academicsky https://ow.ly/Trfm50XG7pu

Delighted to publish Forum Article by @nicolasgaltier.bsky.social et al: "Journals run by learned societies or universities have more ethical policies while being cheaper and similarly cited" doi.org/10.1093/jeb/... Thank you for choosing JEB - we encourage the support of #societyjournals

We know good research can take time, and that’s why we’re proud to invest for the long term. After 20 years of public investment, BIOMASS, a satellite mission designed to track the health of Earth’s forests, is in space🚀 Find out more: www.ukri.org/who-we-are/h...

New study from @michellebeyer.bsky.social published in Animal Behaviour: Silk of females performing maternal care elicits reduced courtship responses in male spiders.

ESEB's Global Evolutionary Biology Initiative invites project applications supporting local evolutionary research networks. Deadline: March 1, 2026. Max funding: €10,000. Apply: [email protected]. More … https://eseb.org/prizes-funding/global-evolutionary-biology-initiative/events-supported-by-gebi/.

The prestigious Queen Elizabeth Prize for Higher and Further Education – part of the UK national Honours system – recognises Leeds’ outstanding, 150-years of textile research. We delve into the history and explore the innovation driving the next chapter 👇 https://www.leeds.ac.uk/qep

Honored to announce the Hamilton Lecture 2026! Leigh Simmons, Emeritus Professor of Evolutionary Biology at the University of Western Australia has made an outstanding contribution to the field of sexual selection acting from the whole organism to its gametes, and to our Society.

🪰🧪 now out in @evolletters.bsky.social, social environmental effects on Drosophila lifespan and reproductive senescence mean females not males "live fast, die young"! Work led by Lauren Harrison and Tracey Chapman, with @alexeimaklakov.bsky.social, funded by BBSRC @ukri.org doi.org/10.1093/evle...

My lab at Indiana University is searching for a *postdoc* and *technician* to contribute to our work studying the evolution of social behavior using fruit flies as a model system. Details below, feel free to email me with any questions! More info on our research: saltzlab.com

Interested in thermal biology? Please join our new and growing grass roots initiative, the Thermal Ecology Alliance, initiated by @patricepottier.bsky.social. 🧪🐟🦑🌡️ Sign up here: www.thermalecologyalliance.org#participation Check who already signed up: www.thermalecologyalliance.org#community

Government has published one of those quiet but important documents that might get overlooked as it is not 'newsy'. The headline finding is that £1 of public R&D investment generates £8 in net economic benefits for the UK over the long term www.gov.uk/government/p...

We had two papers out in Science and Scientific Reports in the past week - I couldn't be happier! Science paper on architectural immunity: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... Scientific Reports paper on the synergistic interaction between new-generation pesticide and disease: doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Have your say on BBSRC’s applicant-led mode funding. The consultation will assess its effectiveness, reach and impact - your views will help shape how we support world-class bioscience. Find out more and get involved: www.ukri.org/news/bbsrc-s... #BBSRC

doi.org/10.1126/scie... This seems rad: overexpressing FruM in a set of proboscis-motorneuron-projecting neurons makes melanogaster males add food-sharing to their courtship repertoire. It is fascinating to see evolutionary shifts in behavior be tied so concretely to shifts in brain development!