Perhaps it's a good thing I can't have grad students of my own. I get WAY too involved any time a grad student asks for my help. I would be the worst hands-on advisor, and cause mad stress for both myself and the students

UC Davis Ecology & Evolution Grad Preview Program is accepting applications until July 20th! It's a fully virtual program where you are paired with a grad student mentor and learn about what grad school entails, how to apply, and what student life is like! Please share widely!

Me: I’m getting addicted to energy drinks, if i drink them 2 days in a row i get a headache if i don’t drink one on the 3rd day. I should stop Me: doesn’t stop. Gets headache on the 3rd day. Drinks an energy drink to cure it,

I know this is pretty jarring to hear, but FYI 2026 is more than half over

I was today years old when i realized I’ve been mixing up fitness functions and adaptive landscapes all my life. One of the best parts of preparing to teach evolution is discovering and correcting my own deficits and misconceptions!

Asteroid Threat xkcd.com/3265/

Birthright citizenship for the win.

Our Argentinian gaffer gleefully singing Country Roads is the future liberals want. Fuck you, Stephen Miller, you arythmic goblin.

COUNTRY ROADSSSSSSSS TAKE ME HOOOOOMEEEEEE

Damn even i am gonna start to have to cheer for USNMT

Maybe it’s naive and silly of me, but i find it heartwarming and hopeful to see a full stadium in one of the “bluest” cities in the country belting out a song about one of the “reddest” states

The word "hitchhiking" has no business having two h's next to each other

Help! Structuring my Evolution class, I'm having a hard time going from nat sel as change in allele freqs to nat sel as the creative force behind complex traits--which honestly was also (still is?) the main difficulty for me when learning evo. Currently I'm planning...

Did you think hermit crabs always live in snail shells? 🧪🦀 Some deep sea hermit species live symbiotically with anemones that DISSOLVE the shell and SECRETE a new one ("carcinoecium") made of chitin! The carcinoecium has evolved at least 3 times! Photo credits in alt text. @megdaly.bsky.social

One day you’re young, then the next day you spend 5 minutes just arranging the pillows properly so you can lie down comfortably in bed and read a book for a little

Stay home all day with AC and blow up my electric bill, or set the AC a little higher leave home and brave the furnace?

It doesn't help that there's a chain of gyms called literally FITNESS EVOLUTION

Trying to look up images to illustrate my lecture on (evolutionary) fitness is hard. 99% of what shows up on google in people in the gym 🙄

Checked one “living fossil” off my bucket list… now onto coelacanths!!!

BREAKING: The NYC Rent Guidelines Board just approved a two-year rent freeze for about 1 million rent-stabilized apartments.

NEW: Mamdani’s rent freeze APPROVED. Tell me again how he’ll “never get anything done.” www.nytimes.com/2026/06/25/n...

I always like thinking about: what is the oldest object you regularly use, the oldest thing you're using in your normal everyday life

I'll be talking about this at #AOS2026 in August btw!

Also check out these GORGEOUS watercolors by Rice biology/art student Caroline Pollan!

Excited to share the (modest) results of our monitoring of bird-building collisions at Rice University, along with the hot and probably ill-informed takes of an evolutionary biologist dabbling into conservation for the first time!!! With huge thanks to... ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v...

Crowd sourcing this as I'm unsure! I've been asked to help someone who wants to transition into "research data science roles in palaeobiology". Do these exist outside of postdocs/PhDs? The data scientists I know with paleo backgrounds are not working in paleo. Any ideas @palaeoverse.bsky.social?

Here's a new kind of taxonomic vandalism. Like, WTF.

Freed! Thanks FDNY!!!! They opened up the roof to let me out

Stuck in an elevator after it fell down all the way in starts and stops, AMA

They say seeing a Raven is a bad omen, but personally i feel my day is made every time i see one

What's it called when you already have a safe permanent job, but get over-invested in a friend's job market journey, and crushed when they don't land their (your?) dream job?

🔊 We're getting ready to update the @birdsoftheworld.bsky.social #phylogeny & #taxonomy! Please please please! If you have a phylogeny published in the last year, or you've noticed one we're missing, let us know via the feedback form at the top of the page. birdsoftheworld.org/bow/phylogen... @world

Roz couldn’t care less about the World Cup…

Ethics and moral philosophy. "Can we do it?" is a very different question than "Should we do it?"

Help settle a disagreement between @brendanoloughlin.bsky.social and I: how do you define parasitoidism?

Did you know? The bearded vulture is the only known animal whose diet is almost exclusively bone. Original post

AVIAN PHYLOGENY researchers! A call for new data!

multiculturalism is pretty great

New fear unlocked, thanks to this cool little report from my old friend Vagner Cavarezere's lab! www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Eu juro que eu tento ser frio e cínico, mas confesso o hino do Brasil na Copa me causa um arrepio extra

I remember when i was a fresh grad student frowning at being told ancestral character estimation was almost never a good idea. How fast have i become the one telling students that now—and being frowned at! It feels v weird but also kinda exhilarating, planting the seeds of doubt in their lil minds!

So while most biologists today learn from rats, mice, worms, flies, or cells; the foundational theory of modern biology was inspired by very weird birds. Tanagers Pigeons 🤝 demonstrating evolution for Darwin More here:

Explaining to stdts why phylogeny causes spp to be nonindependent, i talk a lot but feel like it’s just saying the same obvious thing in many different ways—and stdts have no trouble understanding. Is there a nonobvious to explain it? Or is it just somehow both ineffable and intuitive?

Explaining to stdts why phylogeny causes spp to be nonindependent, i talk a lot but feel like it’s just saying the same obvious thing in many different ways—and stdts have no trouble understanding. Is there a nonobvious to explain it? Or is it just somehow both ineffable and intuitive?

I am recruiting PhD students for my new lab housed in the Sam Noble Museum at University of Oklahoma! If you are interested in fish macroevolution, geometric morphometrics, specimen-based research & phylogenomics please reach out. More info here: fishdiversitylab.weebly.com Please share widely!!!

Mario de Pinna, undergrad systematics professor who introduced us not only to tree thinking but also to philosophy of science

I'm hiring a postdoc (start date flexible) and a PhD student (for Fall 2027) to work in any area of computational phylogenetics! More info here: mhibbins.github.io I will be attending both PEQG and Evolution in June, so please reach out if you want to chat at these meetings!

Why aren’t US states making plans to found and endow their own basic science funding agencies? FAPESP, the science agency of Sao Paulo in Brazil could serve as a blueprint (funding as a % of tax revenue written into the state constitution; brutally insulated from politics)

great scientific writing here (in the abstract, no less) "Dung beetles had an inordinate fondness for elephant dung..." www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...