Having had direct exposure to one of these groups, I am 100% sure this is true

If only Ed Muskie were here to see this

HHS just published an update to its Scientific Integrity Policy. Notably, it has removed the concept of political interference, and no longer calls it out as something specifically to be prevented. www.hhs.gov/sites/defaul... (deletions in red, insertions in green)

The Chinese banyan stem gall first found in Hawaii in 2012 finally has a name! Meet Josephiella manana, and its associate Gibsonoma kuewa. Fun small project with @kmagnacca.bsky.social in sorting out some of these introduced micro wasps of Hawaii. Link to paper: tinyurl.com/ych93swd

Sheep go to Heaven, goats go to Hell

Imagine being able to 3D print any pasta shape you want and using the Barilla recipe for it 😒

Come on, this is clearly a tenebrionid

This is killing me but goddamn 💀

My big takeaway from reporting this story is that it's not JUST about the Forest Service. The closure of these stations threatens to upend a delicate system of mutually beneficial collaboration and resource sharing, and the impacts will ripple out far beyond the Forest Service itself.

Gotta make sure a discussion on scientific integrity is neutral and balanced by including people who are against it

And here we go!

Received a review request for a journal I wasn't aware of. Manuscript title and abstract were fanciful. An opportunity to "discover" 😆 that Springer Nature copied MDPI with a bunch of (semi)predatory journals named "discover something". Be sure not to review or publish in these journals. ⚒️ 🧪 1/2

The beginning of this article was so bad that I didn't get to the end, where there's this howler. I have to assume this was not peer reviewed.

Science is inherently political due to the fact that politicians are actively trying to stifle science in the US. Agency science. Academic science. all of it.

#BlockParty 25K for this scrapey scraper 😭

Me, joking: I can’t believe we chose “destroying the economy” and “losing wars” over “being nice to trans people occasionally” Conservatives, dead serious: it was a tough choice, but I’m glad we picked “destroying the economy” and “losing wars” over “being nice to trans people occasionally”

Tree snail! 🐌 As much as I loved making the i'iwi I think this guy was my fav of the bunch. Making the spiral pattern on the shell was fun. First snail I've ever made! ❤️ #lego

“Crunch” is not a term one normally associates with blueberries

“I am simply overwhelmed by the abyssal stupidity and pointlessness of the wars we are enduring now, so I decided to do something stupid and pointless that isn’t a war.”

Few are brave enough to acknowledge the truth.

All the other issues about the utility and ethics of AI aside, I feel like the real divide is between people who are fine with this kind of interaction, and those for whom it makes them want to set their computer on fire and join the Butlerian jihad.

Want to start doing soil animal macrophotography? Or fancy a rare glimpse into mine and @mesofauna.bsky.social's minds? An article has just dropped in @soilorganismsj.bsky.social, showcasing mine and Andy's love for documenting soil biodiversity! 🧪🪱 Open Access: soil-organisms.org/SO/article/v...

We never got back to pre-9/11 "normal", and what's happening now is far beyond that.

Ok step one is to make them look less delicious

Source: Science News share.google/eGNc4HzUHRLd... Phantom crane flies and flight.

Happy 20th Anniversary! As a taxonomist, I am incredibly grateful for your existence. I access your information nearly on a daily basis for several different projects including #ColeopteraDeColombia. The #Biodiversity world would not be the same without you! Cheers! #BHLat20 #ILoveBHL

My advice to biologists tempted to use AI/LLMs to code their analyses: don't. (I'm continuing with reviewing the analyses for our article, and it's taken me all morning to figure out what the code is trying to do.)

"It's not fair of environmentalists to point out that in addition to being finite resources that are actively destroying the planet, fossil fuels also leave us at the mercy of fragile supply and logistics chains significantly controlled by autocrats in geopolitically chaotic parts of the world."

Unfortunately you only get damages like this if you register a copyrighted work, which is something I never thought about for my scientific papers. Lesson learned going forward!

Robert E. Lee got his ass beat at Gettysburg by a professor of rhetoric and oratory from Bowdoin College and generations of reactionary fantasists have died mad about it.

DOGE-boys-to-prison pipeline needs to happen

Any use of genAI always reads to me like: “We just used a little bit of shit in our cake because we couldn’t afford chocolate.”

Excited to be flying this week!

Uh, yikes... waterdata.usgs.gov/monitoring-l...

Congratulations to everyone who voted for Trump because they wanted groceries to be cheaper

On #TaxonomistAppreciationDay I want to highlight some of the recent new species that I've described along with colleagues, many are from the global south where much of this diversity is from (and still awaits discover). First up, two species of herb gall wasps and a parasitoid from Sichuan, China.

Taxonomist Appreciation Day post I am in freakin' AWE of people doing primary taxonomic work. To do it well, you need deep scholarship to track past naming (and misnaming) efforts. You may need to hunt down specimens only to discover they are damaged, misindentified, or lost. 1/3

My big monograph is finally out in @ejtaxonomy.bsky.social right on #taxonomistappreciationday! 169 new species of flat wasps from Australia, many of them with remarkable head modifications for seeking their hosts. So excited to see this published after 8 years, available free and open access. 🧪

Interesting and disturbing story. On a smaller scale, I and a number of others I know have been persistently contacted by someone from Malaysia (using an English-sounding name) trying to buy seeds of endangered Hawaiian plants.

i heard this guy say we should build with what we extract and not just set it on fire maybe he was on to something

My big monograph is finally out in @ejtaxonomy.bsky.social right on #taxonomistappreciationday! 169 new species of flat wasps from Australia, many of them with remarkable head modifications for seeking their hosts. So excited to see this published after 8 years, available free and open access. 🧪

And if your guy knows to look for Astichus, the stripiest wasp, you know you've got someone who won't leave you on a mountain www.inaturalist.org/observations...

I wanna know how many takes this took. You can see him fighting to keep from laughing his ass off

Tremendous commentary here as well. This is what I assume Russian dashcam videos are saying in Russian.

OK, so I still haven't been to the summit but latest info I get says that the observatory got 60"...a meter and a half!!!!...of rain in about 48 hours. Pretty sure they haven't even considered restoring power up there yet.

The War on Woo is launched January 21 2029, with an early morning TLAM strike on a number of unregulated supplement manufacturers and [other targets redacted but we can all imagine some folks that probably deserve a The Doctor Prescribes High Explosives for their work in 'alternative' medicine here]