With @saramitri.bsky.social, @sonjalehtinen.bsky.social and L. Lehmann we’ve launched the UNIL Center for Theory in Ecology and Evolution @unil.bsky.social🇨🇭 To kick things off, we’re offering short visiting fellowships for theorists in ecology & evolution. Apply & pls RP 😀 tinyurl.com/2wem36zz

Congrats Duilio on discovering the 1st Toxin-Antidote system in vertebrates! 🎉He single-handedly established the embryo project in my lab!👍

🚀 New lab preprint on #SexChromosomeTurnover is out on @arxiv.bsky.social Huge congrats to lab thesis student for submitting his PhD @fwovlaanderen.bsky.social fellowship: big milestone and fingers crossed 🤞 and to all students for the submissions🤞🤞 More to come soon… 🐸🧬 arxiv.org/abs/2602.23624

Superbe !

Finally, the bug is back with a round of the Guinness.

I wouldn’t put it this way for research, as science isn’t about winning. But I also returned last week from China with similar sentiments about Chinese prowess. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/10/o...

🚨Hiring a postdoc! Are you interested in #evolutionarygenomics, #sexchromosomes, #transposableelements & #Sexspecific #recombination in 🐸🧬? Join my lab @vubrussel.bsky.social 🔹 @fwovlaanderen.bsky.social funded up to 3y 🔹 Deadline 10/3/2026 🔹 Start ~1/6/2026 Apply 👉: jobs.vub.be/job/Elsene-P...

Feeling grateful to be featured by @vubrussel.bsky.social #VUBTomorrow on the International Day of Women and Girls in Science👩‍🔬 The piece highlights our lab’s work on sex chromosome evolution🧬🐸 vubtomorrow.be/en/wen-juan-... @womeninstem.bsky.social #WomenInScience #WomenAndGirlsInScience #STEM

The most satisfying genome assembler to run, ever. Huge appreciation for the team behind hifiasm 👏

Amazing work

Yes!!

Yeah! Some #wasplove on the cover for our article on complementary sex determination. Photo from Nicolas Vereecken.

New work from @miyapan.bsky.social and our team, bringing ant, bee, and wasp labs together. @chuanxinyu.bsky.social shows that the ANTSR locus we discovered in ants has determined sex for 150+ My across bees and stinging wasps 🐜🐝, despite virtually no sequence conservation 😮 doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

Apply for a PhD position in the Pan lab @miyapan.bsky.social at MPI Biology 🇩🇪 to study the molecular mechanisms and evolution of sex determination in haplodiploid insects 🐜🐝.

Junior professorship in evolutionary ecology of Hymenoptera, Frankfurt, Germany 🐜🐝

Celebrating a new building for our Center for Evolutionary and Organismal Biology at Zhejiang University 🎉, with an amazing symposium bringing together leading voices in evolutionary biology from around the world.

You are ABSOLUTELY NOT going to regret listening to this bird:

Join @miyapan.bsky.social’s new lab at the Max Planck Institute for Biology. Two PhD positions on ants to study the molecular mechanisms of complementary sex determination and epigenetic sex determination 🐜🐜🐜. Multiple PhD projects available in the Institute.

Beautiful!

New preprint from the lab: A reference brain for the clonal raider ant. With this resource, which is based on 40 individual brains, you can register and compare all kinds of samples in a common space. It comes with lots of detailed protocols and a user-friendly GUI. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Friday Flyday! A mating pair of big-headed flies, Pipunculidae, photographed in Texas.

@AntCommunity 🐜 🐜 Chengyuan Liu found a Camponotus ant colony where all sexual larvae have red spots of various sizes, but worker larvae don’t. Any idea what this is?🤔 Video in the comment.

I definitely wasn’t early to the Listers party, but I’m glad I made it. Can recommend to all birder adjacent and bird curious folks 🪶 m.youtube.com/watch?v=zl-w...

There’s a leak - and a conceptual artist - at the Max Planck 👌

"Striking diversity of male-killing symbionts and their mechanisms" by Hiroshi Arai (@haraipapilio.bsky.social), Daisuke Kageyama (@daisukekageyama.bsky.social) & co "Why [and how] do maternally inherited endosymbionts kill male hosts?" Find out here: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Would a rose by any other gene smell so sweet?

Which species is that?

tinyurl.com/4twykhnx, tinyurl.com/2f72a6we Piekarski: “"If some environmental factor affects caste, it will affect size too,” “…As far as we can tell, no matter which environmental variable you manipulate, the [genetically encoded] relationship between ant body size and caste remains unchanged"

Invasive Tapinoma ants at Ingelheim station Germany are so determined they’re crossing rails to get food. Total takeover 😮

These NPG spinoff journals are out of control

PostDoc position @Uni Mainz (Germany) with @crltt.bsky.social and me #genomics #transcriptomics #Neurobiology to investigate the olfactory system of ants from genes to neurons Information: seafile.rlp.net/f/53a92045be...

We are launching the Fourth Edition of the Evolutionary Biology Crash Course ⭐ @evobiocc.bsky.social ⭐. There will be three weeks covering a myriad of topics in evolutionary biology with many practicals. Please RT to reach as many students as possible. docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Spectacular !

Spectacular work !

Our new study on the emergence of the eukaryotic cell as an evolutionary algorithmic phase transition. The transition was continuous yet abrupt... www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... See more results, such as the next scaling law in the entire tree of life:

I'm unreasonably proud of these slides.

3-Year PhD position @Uni Mainz (Germany) with @crltt.bsky.social, S. Foitzik, and me #Neurobiology #genomics #transcriptomics to investigate the olfactory system of ants from genes to neurons Information: seafile.rlp.net/f/5df9298781... We still have a postdoc position available for this project.

🤢

collaborative effort involving almost all previous postdocs in the lab and many years, but it is out and it is a great story! @kamilsjaron.bsky.social @ajmongue.bsky.social and many others

Some very interesting research from Imperial College London on why flying insects seem attracted to artificial light 🌃💡🦋 Spoiler alert! It's not lunar navigation 🌕 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I am thrilled that our paper, which is packed with our 10 years of data on the venom proteins of the parasitoid wasp Asobara japonica, has just been published! Parasitoid wasp venoms degrade Drosophila imaginal discs for successful parasitism | Science Advances www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

2-Year Postdoc @Uni Mainz (Germany) with @crltt.bsky.social, S. Foitzik, and me #Neurobiology #genomics #transcriptomics to investigate the olfactory system of ants from genes to neurons Information: seafile.rlp.net/f/53a92045be...

In 1897, Alfred G. Mayer created his butterfly wing projections, an attempt to gain new insights into natural patterns and laws. Vertical blocks denote individual wings, distorted and stretched mathematically to fill a tidy rectangular space. More here: publicdomainreview.org/collection/m...

Very nice

This is a catastrophe. While Finland has downgraded the MDPI and Frontiers journals to level 0 (meaning these publications are not recognized for research evaluation purposes), Germany has signed an agreement to promote publications in MDPI journals.

In one year, I genetically engineered the boring Arabidopsis into a beautiful ornamental flower 🧬🌹 Here is how and why I gave this model organism a visual upgrade 🧵(1/7)

#waspday at @NHM London!! look this amazing Polybia nest!!! thanks @gavinbroad.bsky.social with @waspwoman.bsky.social @femi-benny.bsky.social @ionace.bsky.social