Cool discussion of social insect evolution and how to navigate the Xosphere. With my wonderful daughter. www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_46...

Part 3 of my Malawi cichlid ID guide is out. I realise i haven't done part 2 yet! It is in progress. ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v...

Another new preprint, this one intended for a peer-reviewed journal, reports a new species of Lake Malawi cichlid, which probably attacks mouthbrooding female cichlids to feed on the eggs and larvae they are carrying. Preprints are not valid taxonomic publications. ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v...

Chindongo minutus, a small, but fiercely territorial cichlid from the rocky shores around Nkhata Bay, Lake Malawi. Males defend 'algal gardens', picking off nutritious material from among the tough attached filaments & a spawning site among the rocks. The drab females are able to range more widely.

Part 1 version 1 of my Malawi cichlid ID guide is out now. 2 more parts for follow, with my intention being to revise, expand and improve each over time. This one is essentially a companion to our whole genome sequence paper in Science (Blumer et al. 2025). ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v...

Amazing development of the genital tassel on the dominant male Oreochromis squamipinnis (Lake Malawi endemic).

Check out our new paper! We find cavefish colonized caves 3x and global cooling events may have influenced these events. royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

Diving beetle at RSPB Conway. Colymbetes fuscus?

A bundle of axolotls

Butterwort- carnivorous plant

Lake Malawi cichlids: even common, big, spectacular species are often a taxonomic mess, like these Taeniolethrinops species. Much work needed!

Front garden

Seaside bluebells yesterday.

Only described in 1977, Lethrinops microdon, once the dominant species in the bottom trawl fishery in southern Lake Malawi, had disappeared completely by the late 1990s. We rediscovered it in very deep water at the northern end of the lake in 2023.

Lethrinops micrentodon is another species that seems to have disappeared in the southern parts of Lake Malawi but cropped up again in the north. It has a similar pharyngeal bone to L. stridei & L. microdon (many tiny closely-packed teeth) but fewer gillrakers. It feeds mainly on sedimented diatoms.

Early pink campion yesterday, near Bangor golf course

Lamps on Bangor Pier. Love the attention to detail! Why not just make it lovely?

Wild cherry trees have got extrafloral nectaries to reward ants. Didn't know about this before. I was taking pics of the flowers and spotted this. Amazing. Not many ants about at the moment, but something to look out for later on in the year!

Never seen before (unless you follow me on Fb), here is a Lake Malawi Protomelas with unusual square-ended oral jaws & lots of teeth (5-6 rows). Caught in shallow water near Ngara (Karonga District), we got quite a few from 2 different trawls, so it doesn't seem particularly rare in the area.

I first distinguished this species from a specimen at Cambridge from our 2016 survey. Nice to find some more specimens in stronger breeding colours and from the opposite end of the lake in the 2023 survey.

Might have rediscovered Lethrinops macracanthus, a deep water Lake Malawi cichlid missing since the early 1990s.

Baby axolotls. Bigger ones feeding on brine shrimp. Maybe some white ones?

Placidochromis nkhotakotae, described by Hanssens in 2004, has lots of gillrakers. I collected it in the 1990s but didn't get a fresh colour photo. We got one from Karonga in 2023, but actually a better one (sequenced) in 2017 from a pair trawl catch in the SW Arm. Clearly widely distributed.

This deepwater species from Karonga is definitely an Alticorpus (highly expanded lateral line pits, big mental process), but isn't one of the usual ones. It might be A. profundicola, which was described in 1988 from specimens collected 10 years before, and has never been photographed fresh.

Mylochromis sp. 'kande' was a new one for me in 2023. Originally identified by Konings from a breeding group at Kande Island, we got several nearby off Chintheche. Males have yellow chins and females an orange lower half of caudal.

Placidochromis ecclesi was described by Hanssens in 2004 from 4 specimens trawled from 123-125m in Lukoma Bay, Tanzania in 1998. I think this is another one: first fresh photo! It's a tiny fish: both these specimens are only 58mm SL and look like mature males.

A new species to me, from the 2023 trawl survey. I think we only got a single specimen of this from a deep water trawl from off Chintheche, on the sandy bay south of Nkhata Bay.

I collected this species on a trawl in Mozambique in 1999 (specimens still OK) and we got it again in 2023, when the Malawi Fisheries research trawler Ndunduma was again able to sample in Mozambique in a collaborative survey ! Never known outside Mozambique. Should have a sequence now.

Nice to see this one out in final version. Can't pretend I really understand the methods, but it is another insight into the role of structural rearrangements in the evolution of Malawi cichlids. genome.cshlp.org/content/earl...

Looks interesting. Malawi cichlids don't really do much hybrid incompatibility, but it is interesting to get a good overview of the field.

I think these are basically all the same thing. Fairly non-descript shallow sand cichlid, except the faint double-bar markings. Nice to see a pattern emerging from something I first collected around 35 years ago. Hopefully we can get a sequence from the 2023 collection...

Aberffraw today

Egret at Aberffraw today

Super-rare Oreochromis chungruruensis fry growing well (with rejected N.brichardi 'helper').

Impending description of a deepwater Malawi cichlid, with molluscivorous pharyngeal dentition. Similar to (and related to) Mylochromis anaphyrmus but currently would fall within Otopharynx on basis of melanin pattern. Has some strange stuff going on with chromosomal inversions!

Looking like USA pulls the plug on Ukraine/Europe, in exchange Russia pulls the plug on Iran/proxies. Both wars to continue. Full speed ahead on fossil fuels- anyone that matters can buy their way out of climate breakdown. The new Axis: Trump/Putin/Netanyahu/MBS/tech billionaires.

Comment on Haplochromis: the type is a Lake Victoria endemic. Any future cladistically-defined Haplochromis that includes everything within the nodes shown in yellow must necessarily make ALL LAKE MALAWIs (mbuna, etc) = Haplochromis. Not going to happen. The other 3 stars are all possible.

Really sad to report that our friend and colleague Richard Fortey passed away this morning after a short battle with cancer. We’ll all miss his wit and wisdom. Here he is checking out a dino footprint we found while filming together on the Isle of Wight

Aberffraw

Working on the description of 5 new Astatotilapia species from Tanzania.

A spring Celandine!

Bangor peacock

Your regular reminder that the revenue of the entire UK fishing industry is half a billion pounds less than the University of Manchester

We all need a timeline cleanse right now, so let's start the day with this lovely jug with an octopus motif, dating ca 1200-1100 BC. On display at National Museum Copenhagen. 📷 by me 🏺 AncientBluesky #archaeology

The front page we’ve been waiting for 👏

The Corporate Con. With corporate greed out of control, it's time for Labour to start governing. youtu.be/qj-gAUaUF-4?...

Signs of spring in the back garden

Dry January done. But I cheated. Started boxing day, so 37 days booze-free. Let's see how Feb goes!

Good to see some humanity from government www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...