Big coyote poop in the back yard full of cartilage and what looks like deer hair. We saw a big coyote in the yard in daylight a couple of days ago (weird) after seeing a fawn born a few days earlier. Can’t help but think the fawn didn’t make it. Ugh. Natural selection can really suck sometimes.

#caturday #cats

Happy weekend everyone!

Jill runs a butterfly garden in Gainsbourg, GA, where she grew & gave away 6000 native plants at a gardening workshop! Plants were given away with a suggested donation of $1, to support both Xerces and Monarchs Across Georgia. 🌱 Inspired to help out too? Learn how at xerces.org/fundraise

Very happy with how the ninebark bushes that I planted in the Fall are growing. They even have some flowers! Watching trees and shrubs you planted grow in the Spring is the best!

If you'd like to hear Isabelle give a talk about this work, you can watch the seminar version of this manuscript here: cassyni.com/events/TF2rJ...

This is too funny not to share!

We just got approved to hire a teaching professor in Quantitative Methods! This is the *very* rare tenure track teaching position at Berkeley. I'll be chairing the search committee. Official job ad coming later this summer!

The tallest black willows I planted last year are flowering! However, most seem to have been demolished by the deer. I love deer, but man they make it tough to grow willows in the marsh. :(

Checking the black Willow trees in the marsh that we planted last year. Stumbled across this nest. I assume it belongs to redwinged blackbirds. :)

A few minutes after this photo was taken, Mom disappeared and a fawn was trying to stand up. I couldn’t get a picture of the fawn in time, it hid in the grass, but pretty cool to see!

Head's up SSE members: Virtual Evolution is next week! Join us for the SSE Presidential Symposium on May 21 for talks from SSE leaders and past presidents on sustaining research, supporting trainees, navigating funding uncertainty, and strengthening evolutionary biology. Pls RT!

“Last year, a court in Nairobi sentenced two Belgian teenagers to one year in prison, with an option of paying a fine of 1m shillings, after they were found with about 5,000 live giant African harvester queen ants packed in tubes.” 🧪 Conservationists/ moms: no, we have ants at home!

Our resident raccoon is back from its Winter break.

First hummingbird of the season! Yay!

Our iris is flowering @jalene-lamontagne.bsky.social !

Oriole on our serviceberry. Photo through a window :(

Terrible phone photo, but evidence that the Baltimore Orioles are back in town!

New book "A Primer for Experimental Evolution" with coauthors Michael Rose, Margarida Matos, and Joe Graves. www.worldscientific.com/worldscibook... A compact primer for students and colleagues interested in planning and designing experiments to address questions in evolutionary biology.

"What you looking at?" Rhino at Lincoln Park Zoo, Chicago.

Finally got a chance at a photo of a goldfinch in the yard.

A robin enjoying the nice Spring afternoon.

Happy Mother’s Day to all the moms out there! I hope you’re having a wonderful day. Special shout out to my mom, one of my heroes, and my beautiful wife and wonder Mom, Becki.

Conspecific Scaffold-Level Genome Assembly Outperforms Heterospecific Chromosome-Level Assemblies for Assessing Genetic Indicators in a Threatened Marine Fish onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

It's happening, Roberto Cucalón @rvcucalont.bsky.social, my first PhD student is doing their exit seminar today!

IQ-TREE 3: Phylogenomic Inference Software using Complex Evolutionary Models academic.oup.com/mbe/article/...

Want to learn more about migratory suckers in the #GreatLakes. Sucker science! @karenjmurchie.bsky.social youtube.com/shorts/Ump1N...

Very well-timed publication of my most recent work at @royalsociety.org Proc B showcasing the backbone of my future research at @stonybrooku.bsky.social! There is still much to learn about ray-finned fish neurocranial evolution and the diversity of ways brain and endocasts interact in this lineage!

Spring in Crystal Lake.

In the lower #GreatLakes, whitefish numbers have been declining in part due to invasive mussels - now a bill under consideration in the Michigan state Senate would allocate funding to the state's DNR for a rearing/stocking program to support whitefish recovery www.greatlakesnow.org/2026/05/05/m...

Someone out there decided it would be a good idea to put a German Shepherd in charge of babysitting a bunch of Doberman puppies and they were 100% correct

Gift link. Great piece, remarkable embedded footage: www.nytimes.com/2026/04/29/u...

This semester I developed and taught a course on applied population genomics. Lab activities proceed from the basics of the command line and Git to variant calling with workflow managers and a suite of downstream analyses (e.g., ADMIXTURE). All materials can be found here: elinck.org/genomics_eco...

Congratulations to the recipient of the 2026 SSE Lifetime Achievement Award, Dr. Samuel M. Scheiner! Read more about his work as a researcher and NSF Program Officer, as well as his service to the biology community: www.evolutionsociety.org/society-awar...

Dropped off my son at daycare, took the metra from Crystal Lake to Chicago, walked from the metra station to Depaul stopping at Mariano’s to check if they had soup for lunch, got to school and only when using the bathroom, did I realize I still had the alligator sticker my son had put on my head. :/

End of an era. Last imperial stout of the season. Seemed like a good time on such a pretty Spring afternoon.

Good advice but this one hits hard. I’ve certainly had issues keeping up with email. Ugh.

Kassandra L Ford, Rose Peterson, Kory M Evans, Adam P Summers, James S Albert, 2026. Radiations and morphological divergence: complex craniofacial evolution in a diverse group of African electric fishes (Mormyridae), Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, Volume 206, Issue 4. 🐟🧪

A sweet picture my wife took of my son and I enjoying a beautiful spring morning before school.

What a pretty spring day in Crystal Lake!

“Between January 2025 and February 2026, STEM and health employees at science-focused agencies saw nearly 15,000 jobs cut. The rate outpaced cuts among other federal workers.” OPM data - Figure from Wash Post article 19 April. (Where US science has been hit hardest.) NSF at -42%!

Spring is booming in Crystal Lake.

Our little stream it’s doing its job! Lots of water flowing today. So much rain this month in Northern Illinois.

Friday night dinner with the family. :)

Who the heck posted this video of me at my last 5K without my authorization!

📣 Check out this new paper: a huge effort for the largest terrestrial animal! 🐘🌍🧬 Using 232 high-depth genomes, we can now explore the evolutionary history (and possible future) of elephants in unprecedented detail. Really grateful to have been part of this work, and excited to see what comes next!

I just signed a bill to rename Minnesota’s community solar program after Speaker Melissa Hortman. Melissa was a true champion of solar and I was proud to sign this in honor of my dear friend.

New paper led by @taylorblack.bsky.social shows AVT modulates aggression in darter lineages with nest site territoriality and paternal care but elicits no behavioral response in a species that secondarily lost territoriality and care www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

New paper out with @cichlidnick.bsky.social and Peter C. Wainwright. We show that different habitats impact fish diversification. Habitats with a complex benthos show increased diversification rates across ray-finned fishes. www.pnas.org/doi/epdf/10....