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

Did you know BlueSky only has 20 employees? We would like to say a huge THANK YOU to those 20 warriors (who are working 24/7 to keep up with the incredible growth) for giving us a space to share. We escaped hell to be here. Thank you, @bsky.app & Jay Graber CEO (not a billionaire)

Great to see this published! 🐜

Whoops, off to a good start, dropped the link 😅 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Clonal raider ants leaving twitter to join blue sky