I wrote about Renee Good, Venezuela, Greenland, and what it means to be a human being. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

DAVE MATTHEWS: “I don’t want my taxes to pay for masked thugs to roam our streets & terrorize our communities... She was trying to get away. He shot her 3x in the head. Murdered in cold blood. They’re trying to tell us not to believe what we see. FUCK ICE.” (H/T @marcofoster.bsky.social )

Some hope in the world, and animals send us a message of peace and play: when the big one respects the small one, it’s a win-win situation.

Last spring, I was asked to give carreer advice to grad students. And the one thing I told them was: our best skill is our ability to learn difficult things -- it's also the first skill you will lose unless you intentionally don't let yourselves go.

Apparently the early peak is assumed in some fields but how sad is that? One of the best things about my job is I get to keep learning new things and get better at the things I want to improve. (I also get to choose where I invest that effort which is an amazing luxury)

We are pleased to announce the inaugural Gordon Research Conference on Urban Evolution and Ecology which will be held from Jan. 31 - Feb. 5, 2027. Please save the dates, and we look forward to welcoming you to beautiful Ventura Beach, California!

This is one of my wife and I's favorite movies. We watch it regularly. In addition to Rickman, every performance is amazing. Rockwell's "DO I?" and Weaver's "Hold please" get repeated far more often than they probably should.

I'm working on something that requires a lot of professional puffery. Unfortunately, I default to extreme self-deprecation and my colleague on the project is, well, Dutch. I suspect the outcome might look something along the lines of: "Dochtermann is just okay but we would really like the money"

Accurate news reporting from yesterday’s joint lab meeting with @batsrkul.bsky.social‘s group.

I am looking for a postdoc to work in our long-term system of food-caching mountain chickadees in the Sierra Nevada mountains. The expected start is April 2026. Please see details here: chickadeecognition.com/positions If interested and qualified, please contact me directly (email on the website).

I had been trying to adopt universal design approaches. However, given LLMs, I now think I have to move back to in person, paper and pen, for any exams. Similarly, LLM use is forcing a move back to other, more rigid, assessment methods.

Over the last two years I’ve seen “Yet, …” surge in use in place of “However, …”. This seems increasingly the case regardless of field, publication, or country of author. Is this LLM driven or just an emerging norm? (I also don’t like it so it could be biased detection but I don’t think so)

For the Aussies, the zoologists and the architects out there. 💩🧊🧪 By @chazhutton.com

Check footnote 7. Personally, the formula notation has always made a lot more sense to me than the tidyverse "pipes".

We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing: a 🧵 1/n Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820 Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/... Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...

A lot of people are quoting this post and that's good because they should, AI sucks and robs us of something special and only mediocre uncreative piss-babies rely on it to make anything at all, fuck AI, p.s. Emma Thompson is now the president, sorry, that's just how it is

Hi folks, Any recommendations of dissecting scopes with digital cameras that are sufficient for insect (cricket) morphometrics and relatively inexpensive (<2000)? Thanks!

I cannot believe our work is finally out there and in @journal-evo.bsky.social ! This was an enormous group effort! We provide an updated estimate of the number of buzz pollinated angiosperm species, genera, and families, look at consequences for diversification, number of transitions, and more!

As folks get news about promotion and tenure, first, congrats!. Second, some unsolicited advice: Chairs & Deans don’t like the joke “My goal now is to be dead wood”. Solid lede for promotion seminars though.

Did a new one

Just to be super clear, if you’re phoning in your peer review to ai you should quit your job so someone else who actually likes science can have it.

Same: heard that a colleague (in a different department) openly discussed using LLMs for "ideation" and I replied that it was amazing they outright admitted they were bad at their job. Pathetic. Of course that could also probably have been inferred from the use of the word "ideation".

I too would like to move to the beach.

We have an updated version of this preprint, available at: ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v... Fingers crossed the formal, final version will be out soon. We think this highlights a major issue in how we study behavior (& more). Thank you @sekharma.bsky.social & @itchyshin.bsky.social! #evolution

Our newest paper is out in Methods in Ecol Evol @methodsinecoevol.bsky.social :) amazing team effort - we show that the traditional way of analyzing comparative data lacks finesse. besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/action/oidcS... w/ @itchyshin.bsky.social Yefeng Yang, Losia Lagisz & Ayumi Mizuno

my lab has moved to @iubiology.bsky.social! We're getting the #newlab set up here and excited to interact with @iu-cisab.bsky.social, @bdsc.bsky.social, and more! I'd love to hear from prospective lab members, especially prospective PhD students, postdocs, and technicians. more info: saltzlab.com

Always great when a software's documentation contradicts things it can easily do. Arrggh. (felt incompetent, might delete later)

Was reading a paper and recalled how after giving a plenary at my home society, career high point, an NAS fellow said something to the effect of ”I had low expectations but that was actually interesting”. Thanks! 🤣 Those are the kinds of expectations I can hopefully continue to meet!

Science is dominated by male native-English-speakers with elevated affluence. It's a demographic that makes up less than 3% of the total global population. If someone wants to keep politics out of science, they are comfortable enforcing the status quo that benefits them (a small privileged group).

SquidSim is the coolest package - it let's you build complex hierarchical data structures and then simulate data from the world you create. The best tool for doing proper power analyses and testing how well your models can uncover the 'truth'. I've been recommending it to everyone!

Interested in simulating the kind of data that you might commonly find in evolutionary and ecological studies? Then we have the R package for you - squidSim!! Check our new preprint: ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v...

As a final addition, my departmental colleague (@batsrkul.bsky.social) Prof. Erin Gillam and I finally got our poster presentation recorded and up. Just a couple of months late! We looked at average explanatory power across studies in animal behavior. youtu.be/nXZ7yIARokE #ABS2025 #evolution

New preprint out from the lab, including @rroyaute.bsky.social: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... In this we test what we refer to as the "standard model" of behavioral variation. This was inspired by recent work identifying intra-genotypic variation as a major contributor to "individuality". 1/

Following up on the #ABS2025 meeting, our lab's presentations are now available on youtube: www.youtube.com/@Dochtermann...

How do overlapping identities shape access and inclusion in ecology? 🌍 Our new report highlights why intersectionality matters and how it helps build a fairer, more inclusive discipline. Read the BES report: https://f.mtr.cool/xjqiwpgdtp 🌎🧪

Wonderful recognition for a great group of people!

What are folks preferred languages for agent/individually based models? I had a grant criticized for proposing to use R. I know how to use R and could brute force on our cluster. A reviewer didn't think this was "real programming" (minor point but annoying). 1/3 #evobio #evolution 🧪

Sticking with the classics this weekend… but, also, maybe they forgot?

Huge thank you @aeastephens.bsky.social‬ for initiating the TrendsTalk series 'Disability in ecology and evolution' in T.R.E.E. providing visibility for disabled researchers in #Ecology & #Evolution to make our field more #inclusive www.cell.com/trends/ecolo...

Something else I mentioned in my workshop this morning on how to develop a sustainable academic writing practice: YOU NEED TO READ. A LOT. And not only read, but ABSORB the knowledge and insights derived from others' scholarship. This will help you find YOUR OWN contribution.

Still buzzing from the society meeting! 🧠💬 From cool talks & social mixers to winning 1st poster 🏆 AND becoming grad rep for my home society, what a ride! Upward & onward🚀 #AcademicTwitter #ABS2025

Wonderful #ABS2025 meeting! Great to see really exciting science & catch up with great people. Four members of the lab came to the meeting this year: one new attendee (Zach Sweep), two-time attendee (Katy Takumi), many-time attendee (MA Sekhar), and me. We all had a great time, thank you ABS!

This was a very nice talk and a lot of turtle rearing!

Concerned about the potential impacts of how taxonomic biases in our research affect the broader generalizations we draw? If not, maybe we should be. If you saw @sekharma.bsky.social 's poster at ABS, you can find the pre-print here: doi.org/10.32942/X2X... w/ @itchyshin.bsky.social #ABS2025

Every single time: Email from European colleagues: Hey, lets talk about project blah-blah. Response a couple of hours later due to time zones: Sounds great, here's where we left it. Automatic response: I'm on holiday for the next 23.7 weeks and won't be checking my email during this time. Cheers!

A coauthor advised I take out em dashes from a manuscript we're about to submit because he doesn't want reviewers to think we used an LLM. Boo. (but I did it)

Our paper on disentangling assortative mating and indirect genetic effects in empirical datasets has just been accepted in @jevbio.bsky.social ! It has been a long process (5 years in the making!) and I am very proud of the result 🥳 academic.oup.com/jeb/advance-...

🧪 National Science Foundation update alert ⚠️⚠️ NSF just made a **lot** of updates to its "priorities" page. It's mixed news. Some good. Some bad. ❌ Not welcome: NSF is now also terminating "environmental justice" awards. The highlighted text here is new: www.nsf.gov/updates-on-p... 1/8... 🧵

Really amazing paper showing a phenomenon that we knew had to be the case mathematically but which hadn't, until now, been clearly empirically demonstrated. This is one for the textbooks. (we read the preprint in a lab meeting awhile back so I'm excited to see it out)